Barrouallie

Where it sits. Barrouallie is a fishing town of roughly two thousand people on the leeward — Caribbean — coast of Saint Vincent, about 21 kilometres north of the capital, Kingstown, along a winding coast road that takes forty-five minutes to drive and crosses several steep river valleys on the way. The town occupies a shelf of flat ground behind a black volcanic sand bay, with the forested ridges of the island's central spine rising immediately behind it and the cone of La Soufrière, 1,234 metres high, dominating the view north. This is the sheltered side of the island: the water is usually glassy in the morning, the swell arrives from the far side, and the small open boats drawn up on the sand can launch straight off the beach.

The story behind it. Saint Vincent was among the last Caribbean islands the Europeans took, held into the late eighteenth century by the Kalinago and the Garifuna, who fought two wars against the British before the deportation of some five thousand Garifuna to the Bay Islands in 1797. Barrouallie's name descends from that Indigenous period, and just south along the coast at Layou stands one of the best-preserved petroglyph sites in the eastern Caribbean, a boulder carved with a large human face beside a river. The town later served the sugar and arrowroot estates of the leeward valleys. Its most distinctive tradition is more recent and harder-edged: Barrouallie is one of the last places in the Caribbean where small cetaceans — locally "blackfish", chiefly short-finned pilot whales — are still hunted from open boats with hand-thrown harpoons, a practice learned from nineteenth-century Yankee whalers and still landing catch on the beach.

On screen. Four kilometres north of Barrouallie is Wallilabou Bay, and Wallilabou is where the harbour of Port Royal was built for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). The production chose the narrow bay for its steep green flanks and its rock arch offshore, then constructed a full waterfront of jetties, warehouse façades and gallows on the shoreline — the dock where Jack Sparrow steps ashore from a sinking boat as it settles under him. A second, larger town set was built further north at Chateaubelair and has since been removed entirely. Both sequels shot on the island as well, and elsewhere in the country the tiny island of Petit Tabac in the Tobago Cays played the sandbar where Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann are marooned.

What survives at Wallilabou. Unusually for a film location, a good deal of the set was left standing. The stone-and-timber jetty, an archway and several façades remain at Wallilabou Anchorage, weathered by two decades of sun and hurricane, along with props, lanterns and a small collection of stills and memorabilia in the bar-restaurant beside them. Yachts still moor in the bay, boat boys come out to take lines, and a river runs down to the beach through a garden of almond trees. It is a modest, faintly melancholy site rather than a theme park, and it costs almost nothing to visit — which is the appeal.

What else is on this coast. The leeward road strings together a series of worthwhile stops. Dark View Falls, near Richmond at the road's northern end, has two cascades reached across a bamboo bridge over the Richmond river. Trinity Falls lies deeper inland on rough track. Boats from Chateaubelair run north to the Falls of Baleine, a 20-metre cascade reachable only from the sea. Beaches here are black sand and the swimming is fine in calm weather, though currents deserve respect. Inland, the volcano can be climbed in a hard day from either coast; La Soufrière erupted explosively in April 2021, dusting these leeward villages with ash and forcing evacuations, and the summit route has since reopened.

Getting there and timing. Argyle International Airport, opened in 2017, sits on the windward side about 40 minutes from Kingstown, with connections from North America and regional hubs. Minibuses run the leeward road from Kingstown's Little Tokyo terminal for a few dollars, though they thin out in the afternoon and stop early; a hired car or driver gives far more freedom for a coast with this many stops. December to May is drier and calmer; hurricane season runs June to November. The town itself is flat and walkable, but the road is steep and narrow, pavements are patchy, and the film-set jetty involves uneven ground. Cash in East Caribbean dollars is useful outside Kingstown, where card machines are rare and bank branches rarer still.