Guadeloupe: La Soufrière Volcano, Creole Cuisine & the French Caribbean's Butterfly Island

Guadeloupe is the French Caribbean, not French-influenced, but France. It is an overseas department, as much a part of the Republic as Normandy or Provence, paying in euros, voting in French elections, and governed from Paris. The island is shaped like a butterfly: Basse-Terre to the west, volcanic and mountainous and wrapped in rainforest; Grande-Terre to the east, flat and limestone and edged with the beaches that fill the postcards. The two wings are joined by a narrow mangrove isthmus, and the whole archipelago sits at the top of the Lesser Antilles, between Dominica and Antigua. It is the most striking and least Anglicized of the Caribbean islands.

La Soufrière

On Basse-Terre rises La Grande Soufrière, an active volcano and the highest peak in the Lesser Antilles at 1,467 meters. The locals call it La Vieille Dame, the Old Lady, and she is the centerpiece of Guadeloupe National Park, the only French national park outside metropolitan France. The climb to the summit is a half-day through cloud forest and fern, over steaming fumaroles and bare volcanic rock, ending in a view that takes in the whole butterfly and the sea on both sides. Below the volcano, the Chutes du Carbet, three waterfalls plunging through the rainforest, are the other great hike of the interior.

Pointe-à-Pitre and the Creole Table

Pointe-à-Pitre, on the seam between the two wings, is the capital, and its market is one of the most alive in the Caribbean, a chaos of spices, tropical fruit, and women in madras headwraps selling accras, the salt-cod fritters that are the island's universal snack. The Creole table is the reason to come. Colombo, a curry of chicken or pork spiced with cumin and turmeric; bokit, a fried bread stuffed with meat and sauce; and the rhum agricole, rum distilled from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses, the spirit that separates the French Caribbean from the rest of the islands. On the coast, the Réserve Cousteau at Pigeon Island is the underwater wonderland Jacques Cousteau called one of the world's finest dive sites.

Getting There

Pointe-à-Pitre International Airport (PTP) is served by direct flights from Paris Orly and Charles de Gaulle on Air France and Air Caraïbes, and from Montreal and Miami.

Reference Links:

- Les Îles de Guadeloupe (official tourism): lesilesdeguadeloupe.com

- Guadeloupe (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadeloupe

- La Grande Soufrière (Wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Soufrière

- Guadeloupe Travel (US News Travel): travel.usnews.com/Guadeloupe