St George's Grenada (Part 1)

St George’s. Fort George is up on the hill to the left    

Sunday morning came but the skies were still ominously grey. Despite this we wanted to get ashore and take a look around St George’s. In particular we wanted to climb up to Fort George because it was the obvious vantage point for an overview of the town.

Passing the Carenage (top L), the marina in the Lagoon (top R). Looking up towards Fort George (bottom L) and the government offices below the fort (bottom R)   

The dinghy ride in from the anchorage took us past the main harbour bay, known as the Carenage, and on towards the Lagoon where the marina is. Between the 2 is the Grenada Yacht Club which has a dinghy dock that visiting yachtsmen can use. We abandoned the dinghy there and then walked into St George’s around the eastern side of the Carenage. That brought us out by the Government buildings which sit below the fort.

Views out towards our anchorage (top) and down into the Lagoon   

Getting up to the fort from there was a bit of a faff and we had to backtrack into the town to find the correct road up to it. The town was founded by the French in 1650 and almost immediately a wooden fort was constructed in the high ground. In 1705 work started on the same site building the stone fort. When the island was ceded to Great Britain at the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the fort was renamed Fort St George. Today, most of the buildings in and around the fort are used by the Grenadian Police as their initial police training centre. Despite this, visitors can still walk around the walls and see the fabulous views down into and across the harbour.

The Lagoon (top) and the Carenage (bottom)    

Having climbed down from the walls of the fort we spotted a plaque in the parade ground highlighting another era in the fort’s history. The plaque marks the spot where revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop was executed, which set in motion the chain of events which led to the US invasion of the island in 1983.

The Grenada National Museum   

With the skies starting to clear a little we immediately felt the intensity of the sun which made things a little warm walking back down into the town. Here we made for the Grenada National Museum which we had spotted during our earlier ramblings. Along with the fort and most of St George’s, the museum took a bit of a battering when Hurricane Ivan hit in 2004 and many of the exhibits were damaged by water. Despite that, it was still well worth the visit to see the undamaged artefacts and to learn a bit about the history of the island.

Sugar cane boiling pans and a still for
distilling the molasses into rum    

The first exhibits in the museum explain what is known about the pre-colonial inhabitants of the island. Evidence suggests that the island was inhabited as far back as 3000BC by the Casimiroid culture. More recently, the Amerindians lived on Grenada but they were displaced by the colonists. Some even leapt to their deaths from a high cliff at the north end of the island, rather than be captured by the invading European forces. Several pieces of pottery and simple tools have been found from that era when the population of Grenada, and the islands further up the Caribbean chain, seemed to be quite transitory. Clearly, they were good seafarers though and were able to move freely and trade between the islands.

As we saw in Barbados, the island’s more recent history was dominated by plantations and in particular sugar cane and rum production. But Granada also has the perfect climate for growing spices. Whilst sugar cane production has demised, growing spices is still lucrative. Known as ‘The Spice Island’, even today nutmeg is the key crop, followed by cocoa, mace, cloves, vanilla, cinnamon and ginger.

St George’s, Grenada