Seven days on an island thirty-four kilometres long and the sister island north of it — St George's harbour, the first underwater sculpture park anywhere, a crater lake in regrown forest, the working nutmeg station at Gouyave, a rum distillery still turning a waterwheel, and Carriacou two years into rebuilding after Beryl.
St George's
A horseshoe harbour in a drowned crater, with the Carenage running round the waterfront and the town stacked up the hill behind it in red fish-scale tiles. Fort George above it was begun by the French in 1705 and is still the headquarters of the police, so you walk parts of it and not others; it is also where Maurice Bishop and seven others were shot on 19 October 1983, and nobody pretends otherwise. The market square is worth timing for a Saturday morning. On the Carenage, the bronze Christ of the Deep was given to the town by an Italian shipping line after Grenadian boatmen took the passengers off the burning liner Bianca C in 1961.
Molinere and the south coast
A boat north from the Carenage to Molinere Bay, where Jason deCaires Taylor sank the first underwater sculpture park in the world from 2006 — deliberately in a bay whose reef Ivan had flattened two years earlier, to give divers somewhere to go that was not the surviving coral. Most figures sit in three to eight metres, so snorkelling is enough; the bay is a marine protected area and there is a fee. The Bianca C herself lies off Point Salines in thirty to fifty metres and is an advanced dive, not a holiday one. Afternoon on Grand Anse, then round to Woburn and the mangrove at Hog Island.
Grand Etang and the interior
The island road climbs to about 530 metres and stops at a lake in an old crater. Mount Qua Qua is two to three hours there and back along the ridge and is a mud scramble for most of the year — boots, not sandals. Seven Sisters is on private land with a small fee and a guide who is genuinely useful on the last descent; Annandale is roadside and takes ten minutes. What you are walking through is mostly twenty years old: Ivan stripped this forest in 2004 and the canopy has grown back since. The mona monkeys were brought from West Africa and behave accordingly.
The north, in one loop
Up the west coast to Gouyave and the nutmeg station, which is a working receiving and grading shed belonging to the growers' co-operative rather than an exhibit — nuts float-tested, cracked and sorted in front of you, and the smell in the building is the reason to come. Then across the top: Belmont Estate for cocoa, from pod to drying tray, though it does not open every day; River Antoine, where a waterwheel has driven the cane mill since 1785 and the rum leaves at 75 per cent, which no airline will carry; and Leapers' Hill at Sauteurs, where in 1651 the Kalinago still holding out against the French went over the cliff rather than surrender. Levera is the turn at the top. If you can arrange this for a Friday, be back in Gouyave in the evening for Fish Friday.
North to Carriacou
The fast ferry leaves the Carenage in the morning and takes about an hour and a half to Hillsborough across open water that is rarely flat — take the tablet before boarding rather than after. Hillsborough is one street facing the beach, and it is the place to understand what 1 July 2024 did here: Beryl came ashore on Carriacou as a category four and damaged or destroyed close to every building on this island and on Petite Martinique. Roofs are the visible measure of the rebuild. Afternoon at Tyrrel Bay, which is the working anchorage and where the yachts and the mangrove are.
Windward and Sandy Island
Across the island to Windward, where boats have been built on the beach since Scottish shipwrights settled here in the nineteenth century and where the families still working do it without drawings — the shape is carried in the head and cut by eye. The storm took boats, sheds and half-finished hulls, and asking about that is not intrusive; it is what everyone is talking about. Petite Martinique is twenty minutes out from Windward across the channel if a boatman is running, and has about nine hundred people on it. Sandy Island is on the other coast, ten minutes off Paradise Beach at L'Esterre or Hillsborough — a sandbar with a stand of palms and a reef along one edge, inside a marine protected area with its own fee — so it is the afternoon rather than a detour from Windward.
Back south
The ferry runs back to St George's in the afternoon, which leaves the morning free for the Carriacou Museum or an hour at Paradise Beach at L'Esterre. If you are flying home the same day, do not connect off the boat — take the twenty-minute flight from Lauriston instead and keep the ferry for the outbound leg, because a cancelled sailing and a fixed departure from Maurice Bishop International is the one way this route can go wrong.
Good to know
Most visitors — EU, UK, US, Canadian, CARICOM and many others — need no visa and are stamped in for a stay decided at the desk, commonly up to three months; there is no advance travel authorisation to buy, and departure tax is collected inside the air fare rather than at the counter. The currency is the East Caribbean dollar, pegged at EC$2.70 to one US dollar since 1976. US dollars are taken almost everywhere, but change comes back in EC at whatever rate the till feels like, usually 2.50 or 2.60, so drawing EC from a bank machine and paying in it is worth roughly five per cent of everything you spend. Cards work in hotels, dive shops and supermarkets and nowhere else worth relying on; the bus fare, the estate entry and the beach bar are cash. Tap water on Grenada is treated and generally fine, and on Carriacou it is not the same question: there is no river supply there, households run on rainwater cisterns, and bottled or filtered is the norm. Driving is on the left and you must buy a local permit — around EC$60, issued through the rental agency or the police station, and the rental firm will normally do it while you sign the contract. Roads are narrow, steep and blind-cornered, the drop is often on your side, and buses do not slow down; if you would rather not, the route buses run the west coast for a couple of EC dollars but thin out sharply after early evening and barely run on Sundays, which is also when you cannot get up the east coast without a car. The Atlantic hurricane season is 1 June to 30 November. Grenada sits at 12°N, at the southern edge of the belt, and is missed far more often than its neighbours — which is exactly why Ivan on 7 September 2004 and Beryl on 1 July 2024 were as bad as they were. Carriacou is functioning and welcoming visitors, but accommodation is fewer rooms than the listings sites suggest, several places are still being rebuilt, and you should book directly and confirm rather than trust a search result. The inter-island fast ferry is the normal way to cross and has been suspended for stretches more than once, so treat it as a plan that needs a second one; the small aircraft to Lauriston takes twenty minutes and costs little more. There is no ferry from Grenada to any other country — Union Island in St Vincent and the Grenadines is visible from Carriacou but reaching it means a chartered boat and immigration clearance at Hillsborough. Beaches carry manchineel trees, usually banded or signed in red: do not shelter under one in rain, and do not touch the fruit. Leatherback turtles nest at Levera between roughly April and July and the beach is worked by licensed monitors — go with them or not at all. Spicemas, the carnival, falls in mid-August rather than before Lent, and the Carriacou Regatta is at the start of the same month, so August is both the best fortnight to be here and the one where every room is taken.
Shorter or longer?
Two or three more days from Carriacou: the mail boat east to Petite Martinique, then a chartered crossing to Union Island with immigration clearance at Hillsborough and at Clifton. It is an arrangement rather than a timetable, and it needs a spare day at the far end.
St George's, Molinere, Grand Etang and the northern loop. Drops the crossing and both Carriacou days, which is most of the travel time and the only weather-dependent part of the route.