San Fernando

San Fernando is Trinidad's second city and its industrial south — 'Sando' to everyone — a hilly town on the Gulf of Paria that grew on sugar, then on the oil of Pointe-à-Pierre, and that keeps, under its working surface, the warmest limes on the island: a lime being the Trinidadian art of gathering to talk, eat and do nothing in particular, at length. Naparima Hill, quarried half away and now a park, looks over the gulf; the Harris Promenade holds the Carnegie library and the old railway station; and the Indo-Trinidadian south around it — Debe, Penal, Princes Town — is the country's best table.

The traveller climbs San Fernando Hill for the view of the gulf and the whole flat south; walks the Promenade and Coffee Street; drives to Debe for doubles at the roadside — the island's fried-bread-and-channa breakfast in its capital —, and for saheena and baiganee at the stalls; visits the Wild Fowl Trust, a bird sanctuary in the ponds of the old refinery, where scarlet ibis and wild ducks nest among the tanks; goes thirty minutes south to the Pitch Lake at La Brea, the largest natural deposit of asphalt on Earth, which paved half the world; and, in Carnival season, gives a night to Skinner Park's stages, where the chutney soca kings are crowned.

The Guide's honesty: San Fernando is a working town with a working town's rhythms and cares — it is not a resort and does not try —; the north's Carnival is bigger, but the south's is its own and cheaper; the refinery closed in 2018 and the town felt it, and the welcome is unchanged; taxis are shared and cheap and best asked about at the stand; the doubles are eaten standing, at any hour, with pepper 'slight' unless one is brave; and a lime cannot be booked, only joined.