Caribbean island is healthy slice of heaven
Dragon’s blood, hanging crab claws and giant fishtails surround me, heightening my senses – although I’m in an environment far more calming than these strange horticultural names might suggest.
I brush past scarlet ginger lilies, fragrant frangipani and a tree offering trailing black berries, which my guide Coady describes as Bob Marley’s dreadlocks.
I’m in St Lucia’s Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens – six acres of horticultural exotica and a Unesco world heritage site, featuring a natural gorge with health-enhancing waters, and part of the Soufriere Estate.
Further on, we reach the Diamond Waterfall, not the most imposing at 50ft high, but whose therapeutic mineral-laden cascades have tinted the rocks a blend of yellow, green and purple. It is served by sulphur springs upstream, its mineralrich volcanic waters spilling over the rockface.
Volcanic soil is the key to the lushness of this Caribbean island, situated between Martinique and St Vincent and to the northwest of Barbados, its richness and tropical rains encouraging even the most difficult of plants to thrive.
Around 300,000 years ago, volcanic activity created a legacy of beauty in the famous Pitons – Gros Piton and Petit Piton – majestic mini mountainous lava globes rising from the Caribbean Sea, and now covered with vegetation and trees.They’ve become prime hiking trails accessible to tourists.
Nestled between those Pitons like a perfectly fitted Cinderella’s slipper is the luxurious Sugar Beach resort, a botanical paradise spread across more than 100 acres of tropical forest with enough planting to mimic Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens’ flora and fauna.
From one end of the large swimming pool near the beach, it feels like you could touch Petit Piton’s almost vertical charcoalcoloured rockface.You can dine on oysters and Tomahawk steak in the grand colonial splendour of The Great Room or go to the beach for more informal pizza, pasta and tacos at the Bayside Restaurant. Edibles including
bananas, mangoes, coconuts and avocados are pointed out in the regular garden tours, which are conducted by the horticulturalists on site.
Wellbeing is big here – from yoga to Piton hikes, rainforest spa treatments and gentle walking trails.
Deep within the network of tropical planting is a rainforest spa, a lantern-lit long wooden corridor leading to treehouses on stilts, perched high above the ground and fringed by a stream. Here, singles or couples can have a range of treatments, many with a nod to the landscape – bamboo massages, body scrubs made from cinnamon, and coconut and sulphur mud wraps to detox and relax. But if a hotel beauty treatment feels a little sterile, there are natural remedies a short drive away, which will provide a grittier, smellier experience altogether.
Venturing out, I dunk myself in toe-curlingly hot muddy water at Sulphur Springs – Soufriere (the former capital) gets its name from the French meaning sulphur mine – slathering myself in gritty, sand-coloured volcanic mud, known for its exfoliating and skin-enhancing properties.
The site is a short walk from the edge of the crater known as La Caldera (the cauldron), described as the Caribbean’s only ‘walk-in’ volcano. It is the sight of the crater nearby, a rocky landscape dotted with mud pits of scalding bubbling water throwing up clouds of smoke and steam, which really sets my skin tingling.
Here, the pungent, rottenegg stench of sulphur catches your throat, and the stark landscape is far removed from the lush oasis its volcanic nutrients have served in the nearby botanical garden.At least the smell keeps the snakes and spiders away.
In the heat of the day, the lush forested oasis of Sugar Beach is beckoning, as we wend our way down to the beach, past deep red crotons, phoenix and areca palms, coral hibiscus and sizzling scarlet flamboyant trees. Hanging crab claws and dragon’s blood never felt so inviting.