Coverage / Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Caribbean
The southernmost country in the Caribbean, a two-island republic that sits just off the Venezuelan coast and shares South America's flora and fauna rather than the small-island Caribbean's. Trinidad is the larger, busier island, home to Port of Spain, the birthplace of the steelpan and calypso, and the region's biggest Carnival, with the forested Northern Range, the Caroni mangroves and the leatherback beaches of the north coast. Tobago is quieter and greener, ringed by coral reefs and covered by the oldest protected rainforest in the western hemisphere.
6 activities · 9 pairings · 13 verified providers
What you can do in Trinidad and Tobago
Wildlife Safaris
- Arima ValleyJan Feb Mar Apr MayBecause Trinidad sits on the continental shelf of South America, it has the bird diversity of the mainland, well over 400 species, without the mainland's scale, and the Arima Valley concentrates that richness in one accessible place. The heart of it is the Asa Wright Nature Centre, a former cocoa and coffee plantation in the Northern Range rainforest that has been a reserve since the 1960s. The signature experience is deceptively simple: you sit on the centre's open veranda above the forest with a rum punch and watch a stream of birds work the feeders a few feet away, hummingbirds including the tiny tufted coquette, purple and green honeycreepers, tanagers, motmots, woodpeckers and the extraordinary calling bearded bellbird. Trails from the estate lead deeper into the forest and, most famously, to a cave with a breeding colony of the oilbird, a nocturnal fruit-eater that navigates by echolocation and is one of the very few accessible colonies anywhere. For a birder it is a bucket-list veranda; for anyone else it is the easiest possible immersion in a living rainforest.
- Caroni SwampJan Feb Mar Apr May DecThe scarlet ibis is Trinidad and Tobago's national bird, and the Caroni Swamp at sunset is where you meet it in force. The bird's colour is startling, a deep flame red it gets from the crabs it eats, and the whole point of a Caroni trip is timing. In the late afternoon a flat-bottomed boat carries you out from the boardwalk through a maze of mangrove channels, past caimans basking on the banks, tree boas coiled in the branches and herons and egrets stalking the shallows, to an open lagoon facing a small mangrove island. Then, as the light drops, the ibis arrive: hundreds and then thousands of them stream in from their feeding grounds and settle on the green island, and it slowly turns scarlet as if the tree is flowering. It is a short, easy, deeply memorable outing barely half an hour from central Port of Spain, run by boatmen who have watched these birds for generations, and it works as well for a family or a first-time birder as for a serious one.
- Grande RiviereMar Apr May Jun Jul AugGrande Riviere is one of the best places in the world to watch a leatherback turtle nest, and on a good night it is almost overwhelming. The leatherback is the largest turtle alive, up to two metres long and over half a tonne, and this single kilometre of north-coast beach draws them in extraordinary numbers between March and August, when hundreds of females can haul out on one beach in a single night to dig and lay. You stand a few feet away in the dark as a giant, ancient animal drops into a trance, excavates her nest and lays around a hundred eggs, then covers them and drags herself back to the sea, while weeks later hatchlings boil out of the sand and scramble for the surf. The whole thing is run by the village itself: local guides brief you on the biology first, then find a nesting turtle so groups watch without lights or crowding, and the same community patrols the beach through the season to protect nests from poaching and disorientation. It is a genuine conservation success, and far from any resort, so the setting is a dark, wild, forest-backed coast rather than a spectacle.
Witness / Attend
- Divali NagarChaguanasOct NovThe Divali Nagar is the largest celebration of Divali outside India, and it turns Chaguanas into a nine-night showcase of Indo-Trinidadian culture. About four in ten Trinidadians trace their roots to indentured labourers who came from India in the nineteenth century, and the Nagar, staged since 1986 by the National Council of Indian Culture, is where that heritage comes to the surface. On a permanent festival ground the council builds a temporary city of light: a main stage running classical Indian and local chutney music, dance and drama every night, a large religious exhibition built each year around a Hindu theme, stalls of Divali sweets, doubles and vegetarian food, and a market of saris, brassware and crafts, all free to enter. It climaxes as Divali itself approaches and the whole country lights deyas, the small clay oil lamps, along walls and driveways. Coming to the Nagar is the easy, welcoming way for a visitor to step into the festival, eat well and hear the music, before Divali night when the island glows with lamps.
- Trinidad CarnivalPort of SpainFeb MarTrinidad Carnival is the original Caribbean Carnival and still the biggest and most musically serious of them all, the event every other island's carnival is descended from. For the two days before Ash Wednesday, Port of Spain becomes a moving festival: tens of thousands of masqueraders in costume cross the stage at the Queen's Park Savannah with their bands, calypso and soca blast from music trucks, and the streets belong to the road. It begins before dawn on Carnival Monday with J'ouvert, when revellers cover themselves in mud, oil, paint and chocolate and follow steelbands through the dark, and builds through two days of the Parade of the Bands. Around it sits a whole season of competition that is the real depth of the thing: the Panorama steelband final, the Calypso Monarch, the Soca Monarch and the crowning of the Carnival King and Queen at Dimanche Gras. You can watch from the stands, or register with a mas band and play mas yourself, which is how Trinidadians say Carnival is meant to be experienced. Book flights and rooms months ahead, because the whole city fills.
Best months at a glance
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