Kingstown, the Heart of a Nation.
In the mornings, the streets of Kingstown are filled with uniformed schoolboys, public officials, taxi drivers, rastafaris selling sandals, and older women offering chewing gum, peanuts, and little ginger pieces. From the alleys come natives trying to coax tourists, offering themselves as guides to visit the volcano, or the Belaine falls, or trying to sell records of local calypso groups like Blaksand and New Direction. At noon, when heat dominates the city, public officials, bankers, clerks and lawyers, go for lunch at the Bounty, a café at Halifax Street, or maybe to the restaurant at the top of Cobblestone Inn, an ancient sugar warehouse, turned into a hotel, and in Upper Bay Street.

Despite it being a small city, Kingstown is the heart of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. You will find buildings of colonial greatness. One of the few to stand out, is St Mary’s Cathedral, a catholic church that stands next to Victoria Park, west of the city. Built along the XIX century, and restored in 1940, combines many architectonic styles, from the Romanesque to the Flemish, passing through Arab and Byzantine. At the other side of the park is St. George’s Cathedral, an old Anglican church, Georgian style, with a more austere beauty, and keeping many interesting stories.

Despite Kingstown is the most visible activity source of this little nation, the real wealth is its fertile volcanic land. It’s an island of peasants, a place where everybody knows how to plow a hill, to plant sweet potatoes.

On Fridays and Saturdays, peasants arrive to the city, carrying lots of fruits and vegetables like ginger, yucca and many other products, a sound proof of the wealth of this prolific land. The construction of the new Central Market in Upper Bay Street has caused some controversy among the islanders, as many consider it as an “eye damaging four story monstrous building”. Next to the port, is the new Little Tokyo Fish Market, a fish market built with the economic support of the Japanese Government. From this place, minibuses take you to other places of the island.

At the dock, activity reaches its climax every Tuesday, when a huge merchant vessel of the Geest Company arrives, to load the weekly production of bananas, to be exported to the rest of the world.

The Older Botanical Gardens of the Western Hemisphere
If you leave Kingstown by Leeward Highway, going west, you will soon reach the famous Botanical Gardens (open daily, free entrance). Founded in 1765, to diffuse medicinal species and plants, these are the older botanical gardens of the western hemisphere. Maybe at the entrance door, you’ll find a youngster offering himself as guide for a tour around the 9 has. of gardens, where there are still growing some trees planted with the seeds of many species of trees and plants, brought in 1793 to the Little Antilles, on board of the Bounty, the famous ship of captain William Blight.

A quarter of an hour by car, at the top of a 180m high hill, west of the capital, is Fort Charlotte, a fort built in 1805, where you can enjoy splendid views of the Caribbean Sea and the Grenadines.

Searching the Parrot of St. Vincent
The Leeward Highway, provides a two hours drive through an unbelievable landscape, along the west coast, where dark sand beaches alternate with those of golden sand. Distances that on a plane surface could take 10 minutes, will take you some more time here, because the road has to border hills and valleys with a thick jungle. At 3 km. from Kingstown is the valle de Buccament (Bucament Valley), where you will find a series of marked routes known as Vermont Nature Trails, that has an information center where you will be provided with maps of the routes crossing the tropical jungle. With some luck, maybe you’ll see some St. Vincent parrots, a native species in danger of extinction. Richmond Beach, a beach near the volcano La Soufrière, marks the end of this beautiful and winding road. Those willing to go further to the north, can only make it by ship. Some local tourist agencies organize one-day tours by ship to the Baleine falls, which are in the northern point of St. Vincent.