Introduction to St. Lucia

St. Lucia (Loo-sha) is becoming overly developed with far too many all-inclusive resorts, but it retains much of its pristine beauty. Its nearest competitor is Barbados, which has been overdeveloped longer than anyone cares to remember. Fortunately, St. Lucia still has smaller inns of charm and grace if you shun the activity-loaded agendas of those all-inclusives with their groaning buffet tables and raucous guests loaded with too many tropical punches.

The heaviest tourist development is concentrated in the northwest, between the capital, Castries, and the northern end of the island, where there's a string of white-sand beaches and a tourist colony (Rodney Bay Village) that's among the most accessorized for holiday playtime on the island.

The rest of St. Lucia remains relatively unspoiled, a checkerboard of green-mantled mountains, valleys, banana plantations, a bubbling volcano, wild orchids, and fishing villages. The island has a mixed French and British heritage, but there's a hint of the South Pacific about it as well.

A ruggedly mountainous island of some 623 sq. km (243 sq. miles), St. Lucia has about 172,000 inhabitants, about 60,000 of whom live in and around the island's steeply inclined and colorful but somewhat battered capital, Castries, which sits on the southern shore of a large harbor surrounded by steeply rising hills.

Rising out of the relative obscurity in which it languished for most of the 20th century, St. Lucia is becoming -- postmillennium -- one of the biggest players in Caribbean tourism. Since the dawn of the new century, World Travel Awards has named it "the world's leading honeymoon destination." Local authorities estimate that 36% of the island's business comes from visitors either getting married or else on a honeymoon here. At the same time, Natural History Magazine has honored St. Lucia as one of the 50 top eco-tourism destinations in the world. There are no easy building sites left on St. Lucia. Those that seem relatively flat were built upon many years ago; most that remain require complicated retaining walls, deep foundations, and in most cases, elaborately winding access roads. Expect a lot of huffing and puffing as you navigate your way up and down the island's endless shifts in altitude, and views of oddly shaped, weirdly eroded hills and rock outcroppings that evoke the South China Seas.

A final oddity about St. Lucia: West Indian women frequently claim St. Lucia has some of the Caribbean's best-looking men. Perhaps it's the mixture of the French, West Indian, and British gene pools, perhaps it's the ongoing exercise from all those changes in elevation. Regardless, St. Lucians are courtly, charming, fun, and in some instances, just a wee bit old-fashioned. Of the many disasters that threaten to engulf St. Lucia, and perhaps the rest of the world as well, what is it they fear the most? As some of them described it to us, it's "Jamaicanization," or the process of lawlessness and social decay that tends to accompany traffic in illegal drugs.