Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: The Real Pirates' Caribbean
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Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a chain of 32 islands and cays stretching 45 kilometres through the Eastern Caribbean — Saint Vincent, the main island, at the north, and the Grenadines, the smaller islands, extending south toward Grenada. The Grenadines include Bequia, Mustique, Canouan, Union Island, and the Tobago Cays — a marine park whose five small uninhabited islands are surrounded by reef so clear that the water looks CGI.
The Garifuna people — descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement and intermarried with the indigenous Kalinago of Saint Vincent — successfully resisted British colonial control of Saint Vincent for over a century. The last Garifuna chief, Paramount Chief Chatoyer, is the national hero of Saint Vincent, celebrated on National Heroes Day every March 14th for his leadership of the Black Carib resistance. In 1797, after final defeat, approximately 5,000 Garifuna were deported to the island of Roatan off Honduras, where their descendants still live and maintain Garifuna language and culture.
Vincey Mas — Saint Vincent's Carnival — is considered one of the most authentic and locally rooted in the Eastern Caribbean, less commercialised than Trinidad's and more community-centred. The music heard on the streets during Carnival is soca, but in Saint Vincent it retains a harder, more percussion-driven edge that musicians describe as Vincy soca. The identity of the small island — aware of but not subsumed by its larger Caribbean neighbours — runs through the music.
