Activities Calendar Coverage Get a plan Sign in Join free

Coverage / Grenada

Grenada

Caribbean

Where Grenada earns a visit: 7 activities across 8 curated destinations.

7 activities · 8 pairings · 11 verified providers

What you can do in Grenada

Culinary / Cooking

Belmont EstateJan Feb Mar Apr May Nov DecGrenada is the Spice Isle, and its cocoa is world-class fine-flavour Trinitario, so the north of the island is one of the best places anywhere to follow chocolate from the tree to the bar. Belmont Estate, a working 17th-century plantation, lets you walk the organic cocoa groves, turn the drying beans with your feet as workers have for generations, watch the fermentary and drying houses, sip cocoa tea and taste chocolate made on site, then sit down to a Creole lunch served from a coal-pot buffet warmed by live charcoal. A few miles away in Hermitage, the Grenada Chocolate Company runs the operation that pioneered the whole idea, the first tree-to-bar chocolate made at source, founded by the late Mott Green to keep the value of the crop in the hands of local farmers. Between the two you get the full story of Grenadian cocoa, the farming, the fermentation, the craft of making a bar and the flavours of the island's kitchen, in the parish where it all happens. May brings the Grenada Chocolate Festival, when the estates open up further with tastings and hands-on sessions.

Music & Culture Festivals

SpicemasSt. George'sAugSpicemas is Grenada's carnival, and it is one of the most distinctive in the Caribbean because its oldest traditions have never been sanded down for tourists. The build-up runs through late July and early August with Panorama steelpan, Soca Monarch and the Traditional Mas Festival, then peaks over two days. Carnival Monday opens before dawn with J'ouvert, when Jab Jab masqueraders coat themselves head to toe in black used engine oil, molasses and tar, drag chains, wear horns and animal parts and pour through the streets of St. George's in a raw, defiant ritual rooted in emancipation from slavery. Monday night brings the Monday Night Mas pyjama and light parade, and Carnival Tuesday, Fancy Mas, fills the capital with the feathered and sequined Parade of the Bands. Around them run traditional characters like the Shortknee and the Vekou. This is a participatory street festival, not a grandstand show, and standing in the Jab Jab crowd at dawn is unlike anything at the glossier carnivals to the north. It is organised by the Spicemas Corporation, the island's official carnival body.

Sailing

St. George'sJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun DecGrenada is the southern anchor of the Grenadines, the chain of small islands that runs north toward St. Vincent, and St. George's is where most sailing here begins. From the marinas on the lagoon a day's sail reaches Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Union Island, Mayreau, the Tobago Cays marine park, Bequia and Mustique, a run of protected anchorages, reef snorkelling and beach-bar stops with steady trade winds and short hops between them. The island sits at the bottom edge of the hurricane belt, which is why it fills each winter with cruising yachts and why insurers favour it as a base. Port Louis Marina, run by Camper and Nicholsons, and the docks at True Blue Bay put full charter fleets and crewed boats within reach, and Grenada's own boatbuilding tradition still turns out wooden sloops on the beaches of Carriacou. You can charter bareboat if you hold the tickets, take a skippered or fully crewed yacht, learn to sail from scratch, or join a local day sail on a hand-built island sloop.

Scuba Diving

Molinere BayJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun DecMolinere Bay is where two of the Caribbean's signature dives sit almost side by side. The Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park was created here in 2006 by Jason deCaires Taylor, the first of its kind in the world, sunk to help reefs recover after Hurricane Ivan tore through Grenada in 2004. Sixty-odd concrete figures rest between five and eight metres down, from the ring of children holding hands known as Vicissitudes to a man at a desk, now furred with coral and circled by fish, shallow enough that snorkellers see them too. A short boat ride away lies the Bianca C, a 180-metre Italian cruise liner that caught fire and sank in 1961, the largest shipwreck in the Caribbean and nicknamed the Titanic of the Caribbean. She sits in 30 to 50 metres for advanced divers, patrolled by eagle rays and barracuda. Grenada counts more than fifteen wrecks in all and calls itself the shipwreck capital of the Caribbean, with warm, clear water and reefs that see far fewer divers than the busier islands to the north.

Trekking / Hiking

Grand Etang National ParkJan Feb Mar Apr MayGrand Etang is the undisputed heart of hiking in Grenada, a cool, misty rainforest in the mountainous spine of the island a half-hour above the coastal heat. From the visitor centre by the crater lake, the classic walk drops through forest of giant bamboo and heliconia to the Seven Sisters Falls, also called St. Margaret's Falls, a chain of cascades with pools you can swim in, reached on a muddy 40 to 45 minute descent. The tougher Mount Qua Qua trail follows the ridgeline for about three kilometres each way through cloud forest to a summit with views across the island to the sea, and the most committed carry on toward Mount St. Catherine, Grenada's highest peak at 840 metres. Mona monkeys, introduced from Africa in the plantation era, come down to the roadside, and armadillo, opossum and dozens of bird species live in the reserve. Grenada's hiking is guided by real characters, among them Telfor Bedeau, who has walked these hills for more than fifty years, so a local guide is as much storyteller as route-finder.

Wine / Spirits Education

River AntoineJan Feb Mar Apr May JunRiver Antoine is the oldest rum distillery in Grenada and one of the last places on earth making rum entirely by pre-industrial methods. Founded by French settlers in 1785, the estate is driven by a waterwheel dating to the 1840s, the oldest functioning watermill in the Caribbean, which turns the mill that crushes the cane. The juice is boiled down in a row of open copper pans over a wood fire, ferments naturally in open stone vats with nothing added, and is distilled into Rivers Royale, a clear overproof rum so strong, at around 69 to 75 percent alcohol, that airlines will not let you carry the full-strength bottle home. Nothing here is automated or bottled for show; you walk through a living factory that has barely changed in more than two hundred years, from cane field to fermentation house to the little bar where the rum is poured. For anyone interested in how spirits were actually made before industry, it is a rare and honest lesson, set in the green hills above the northeast coast.

Witness / Attend

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Music Festivals
Sailing
Scuba Diving
Trekking
Wine & Spirits
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Grenada