Toco

The drive to Toco takes you through the last stretch of Trinidad that still feels genuinely rural, cocoa and coconut estates giving way to a coast road that clings to cliffs above water so rough it looks like a different ocean than the one down at Maracas. Which, in a sense, it is. Toco sits right where the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, and from the point near the lighthouse you can actually see it, two different textures of water pushing against each other in a visible seam that I stood staring at for way too long trying to convince myself it was really there.

The village itself is small and unfussy, pirogues pulled up on the sand, nets drying over fences, a handful of rum shops where the domino games start before noon. We got to Toco Lighthouse in the late afternoon and had it almost entirely to ourselves, just an older fisherman mending a net at the base of the cliff who nodded at us and kept working. The lighthouse itself, squat and white, has been guiding ships around this corner of the island since the 1890s, and standing beside it in the wind you understand exactly why it’s needed to.

We ate at a stand near the fishing depot, grilled kingfish that had probably been swimming that morning, wrapped in foil and eaten standing up because there was nowhere to sit. The man who sold it to us said Toco used to be the ferry point to Tobago before the route moved, and you can feel that faded importance in the place, like a village that peaked at something and settled comfortably into what came after.

What I liked most about Toco was how far it felt from everywhere else in Trinidad, not in kilometers, which aren’t that many, but in temperament. Nobody rushes here. We sat on the rocks near the point long after the light had gone properly gold, watching the two seas keep doing whatever it is they do, and neither of us was in a hurry to leave.

When to go: Dry season afternoons, roughly January to May, when the light is best for the lighthouse and the coast road is least likely to be washed out by rain.