Martinique: A Slice of France, Tropical Forests and,Yes, Beaches Too

At night, visit the cafes in Les Trois-Îlets, like La Pause, which is set up in a large courtyard under a giant umbrella. At Le Bistrot d’en Face, with club music playing low, dozens of conversations almost exclusively in French unfolded across the crowd, as waiters sprinted around with dishes like calamari and moules gratinee. The food at Le Pause was not particularly good — generally we preferred the local Creole restaurants than the French-styled bistros. But again, what was most striking the evening we visited was how much it felt like we were in mainland France itself.

“It is a piece of France, right here on this island,” said Alain Vallaud, from Normandy, who was traveling across Martinique on a rented motorcycle with his girlfriend, Isabelle Patry. “But if you dig down, it is a very distinct place that really captures you.”

Jump across the island to La Caravelle and you leave behind the bistro scene, as this peninsula itself is a nature reserve. As you enter the peninsula, you pass through a few miles of sugar cane fields, and then rolling green countryside, with trees and grass as far as you can see, until your eyes hit the Atlantic. La Caravelle is perhaps best defined by the surfer crowd that has adopted its outermost point, as this is the rougher ocean side of the island, where there are fewer hotels, and people, but still a lot of beautiful spots to admire and idly pass a few days. There are at least two hiking trails on the peninsula, with some tremendous views of the ocean and island landscape.

We met Fabian Engel, a fit surfer there. He was visiting from Portugal with his wife and whose only complaint was that the wind was blowing in a fashion that day that was knocking down the waves. Like many others, his own summary of the place: “The Caribbean, with a taste of Europe.”

We stopped that day to visit Chateau Dubuc, which was once home to a sprawling sugar and coffee plantation. Today the ruins of the estate’s manor house, as well as a carousel cattle mill and sugar house, former slave dwellings and other structures, have been restored (or at least the ruins have been stabilized) with funding from the European Union. You can walk down from the ruins of the chateau to a mangrove swamp and continue into the nearly empty hillsides on a hiking path that offers tremendous views of the vast landscape and choppy waters of the Atlantic.