Nature’s ultimate love child
A dip in Atlantic Ocean-fed bathing pool created by lava, paired with wild scenery, feels healing and humbling
ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES— Our mini tour bus skirts corners on a series of windy roads along St. Vincent’s stunning northeastern Windward Coast, where volcanic hills jut out from expanses of lush fields that overlook the Atlantic Ocean. Pastel-hued homes are scattered throughout the hills, some structurally strong while others vary in degrees of degradation or abandonment. School kids in uniforms rally around a soccer ball in a field lined with palm trees.
When our bus rolls through towns and villages, it feels as though I’ve rolled the rim of my sun hat back into the past, but that’s the charm of this island country. While snowbirds tend to flee to the Caribbean, this archipelago remains less traversed and unspoiled. Its beauty is raw and unfettered and, to some degree, devoid of the Caribbean’s common and colossal all-inclusive chain resorts.
“This village is especially special and traditional,” says Marlon Joseph, the knowledgeable and eversmiling tour guide as we drive through Georgetown to Owia. “Owia is one of the few villages that still carries its indigenous name.”
Owia is a sleepy fishing village, about a two-hour drive from St. Vincent’s capital city of Kingstown. It’s home to descendants of the indigenous Garinagu “Carib” people — a population that had nearly been decimated after Europeans settled in St. Vincent after explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in1492.
Despite sustained resistance from Caribs against colonizers, the French eventually became St. Vincent’s first European settlers in the 1700s, before ceding the islands to Britain in 1763. The British exiled nearly 5,000 Black Carib/Garifuna people to the nearby tiny island of Baliceaux. Only about 300 remained in St. Vincent.
Today, their population is about 1,200, and while most live in the mountainous region of Greiggs, a fair number live in Owia and its surrounding villages.
Legend has it that indigenous people thrived in this area because of the healing waters of the Owia Salt Pond, an ocean-fed bathing pool perched at the northern tip of the Windward side of St. Vincent. The massive saltwater “pond” formed when lava flows from a long-ago eruption of the island’s La Soufrière volcano reached the sea and rapidly cooled, forming a small bowl at the water’s edge.
Our bus travels to what feels like the end of Owia village toward the Atlantic Ocean before it pulls to the side of the road and stops at a fence that reads “Owia Salt Pond.”
We’ve arrived at 5 p.m. to find the fence to the pond closed, but our guide knows the gatekeeper and grabs a key.
The fence opens out to 217 steps that descend into what looks like a scene from a movie filmed in a faraway land.
The waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash into and over dramatic volcanic rock formations. The waves then cascade into the pool, maintaining the water levels of this natural swimming pool.
Lava peaks and boulders enclose the pool, which is flanked by mossgreen hills and mountaintops, splattered with towering palm trees. Reef fish and coral formations add colour.
For a second it feels as if Maui and Fiji gave birth to nature’s ultimate love child.
A father and daughter touring with me debate who is going to take the plunge first; both agree to go together.
I follow, carefully navigating the slippery and at times sharp pebble and rock-strewn pathway into the pool. The clear blue water is chilly initially, but once we shimmy in, it’s refreshing as it swirls around us. Behind us, the crashing waves form mini waterfalls over the rocks.
The entire experience is like swimming in a crystal-clear tropical pool, surrounded by an abstract sculpture garden.
I can’t be sure of the purported therapeutic qualities of the waters in this unusual pond, but this immersion into nature definitely feels healing and humbling.
As guardians of this natural wonder, the Caribs might be wise to keep this secret portal to themselves. Charmaine Noronha’s trip was sponsored by the St. Vincent and the Grenadines tourism board, which did not review or approve this story.