Wallilabou River

Where it sits. The Wallilabou River rises in the Grand Bonhomme massif in the mountainous centre of Saint Vincent and runs northwest to the Caribbean Sea, reaching the coast a few kilometres north of the town of Barrouallie on the island's sheltered leeward side. Its mouth forms Wallilabou Bay, a small dark-sand cove backed by steep green ridges and framed by a rock arch offshore, roughly 40 minutes by road from the capital, Kingstown, along the winding Leeward Highway. Wallilabou Falls, a short walk northeast of the highway, is a modest cascade with a bathing pool that most visitors combine with the bay in a single stop.

The story behind it. This river is a boundary line in Vincentian history. Under the treaty that ended the First Carib War in 1773, the Kalinago were to retain the northern third of the island, from the Wallilabou River on the west coast across to the Byera River on the east — a partition that collapsed within two decades and ended with the deportation of the Garifuna to Central America in 1797. The leeward coast that the river drains is volcanic in the most literal sense: its black sand comes from La Soufrière, the volcano at the island's northern end whose April 2021 eruption sent pyroclastic flows down the valleys and coated much of Saint Vincent in ash. Fishing villages, breadfruit and banana smallholdings and a scatter of rum shops define the shoreline economy today, and the bay itself is a working yacht anchorage where boat crews come out to help visiting sailors take a stern line ashore.

On screen. Wallilabou Bay is where Port Royal was built. Disney chose Saint Vincent as the primary location for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, filming from October 2002 to March 2003 because the production needed a quiet, sheltered beach where a whole harbour town could be erected. Three piers and a backlot went up here for the Port Royal and Tortuga waterfronts, and several hundred islanders were hired as extras and crew. The sets returned to service for Dead Man's Chest, shot in 2005: they had survived three hurricanes in the interim, though the main pier had collapsed the previous November and had to be rebuilt before cameras rolled. Two clarifications matter for anyone matching the films to the ground: the fortress of Fort Charles and Governor Swann's mansion were not built here at all, but on the Palos Verdes peninsula and at Manhattan Beach in California, and the interiors were shot on Los Angeles stages.

What you actually see today. Unusually for a film location, much of the Port Royal harbour front is still standing. The timber facades, the arch, the pier stumps and a scatter of props and set dressing survive at the Wallilabou Anchorage, weathered by two decades of salt and sun and maintained as an informal visitor site with a bar and restaurant attached. The effect is closer to a shipwreck than a theme park — plank walls silvered by the weather, a rusting anchor or two, hand-painted signage — and it is best seen in the morning before the light flattens. Yachts moor in the bay overnight, and the beach is dark grey rather than white, which surprises visitors expecting a postcard Caribbean cove.

Around it. The Leeward Highway is one of the finest coastal drives in the eastern Caribbean, corkscrewing over headlands between fishing settlements at Layou, Barrouallie and Chateaubelair. The Layou petroglyph park, with pre-Columbian rock carvings on a boulder beside a river, is fifteen minutes south. Dark View Falls, a pair of cascades reached by a bamboo bridge, lies further north, and the Vermont Nature Trail, where the endemic Saint Vincent parrot is sometimes seen, climbs into the interior forest from the Buccament valley. Whale- and dolphin-watching boats operate out of Barrouallie, historically a whaling village.

Getting there and timing. Argyle International Airport, opened on 14 February 2017 on the windward coast, brought direct flights to the island and put Wallilabou within about an hour's drive. Minibuses run the Leeward Highway from Kingstown and are cheap but crowded; a hired car or a taxi with a driver gives the freedom to stop at the falls and the viewpoints. The dry season from December to May is the reliable window, with calmer seas and fewer squalls; the hurricane season runs June to November. The site charges a small fee for visitors arriving by land, and photography is welcome. Swimming in the bay is fine but the sand shelves quickly, and river levels at the falls rise fast after rain in the hills.