Grand Anse

Grand Anse is two miles of pale gold sand curving along Grenada's south-west coast, so calm and so gently shelving that the whole island agrees it is the best beach they have, and stops arguing: the water is glass in the morning, the sea grapes and almonds give shade, and St. George's, the prettiest harbour town in the Caribbean, sits just over the headland. Above the beach the campus of St. George's University spreads across the hill, filling the bars and beaches with students from a hundred countries; behind it, the whole island smells faintly of nutmeg, of which it grows a fifth of the world's supply.

The traveller swims Grand Anse at morning and again at sunset; walks the sand to the craft and spice market for saffron, cinnamon and nutmeg jam; takes the water taxi around the point to St. George's for the Carenage, the fort and the market square; snorkels the underwater sculpture park at Molinère, where figures cast from Grenadians stand in a ring on the sea floor; drives inland to the Grand Étang lake, the waterfalls and a nutmeg station; eats an oil down, the national dish, from a roadside pot; and, if it comes in early August, joins Spicemas, the carnival that runs on jab-jab and steel.

The Guide's honesty: Grand Anse is public and shared — locals, students, hotel guests and cruise passengers on port days, who arrive by the busload and leave by four —; the island sits south of the usual hurricane track and was still flattened by Ivan in 2004, so June to November is a real season; the buses are minivans with music, cheap and cheerful, and the taxis are set-price by zone; the sun on the sand is stronger than the breeze suggests; and Grenada is spice, not spectacle — its pleasures are unhurried and its people unhurried with them.