This underrated Caribbean island is back from the brink – and ready to share its treasures with the world

My first visual encounter with Dominica was through the paintings of the Italian-born artist Agostino Brunias, who made a career portraying the island in tame, stylised vignettes that glossed over the grim realities of colonial rule. But within minutes of my arrival there, from the first twist of its serpentine roads, it becomes clear there is nothing tame about this land that sits in the middle of the curve of the Lesser Antilles. It bristles with volcanic energy and glitters with the two-toned leaves of its bois canot trees, flipping from green to white as they waver in the wind. It lulls with the uneven music of its many waterfalls; it throws random rainbows across its astonishing horizons; it bewitches from the depths with its technicolour coral reefs. And when hurricane season comes, it roars.

Mastery of the lush tropical rainforest that covers more than 60 per cent of the island is how the native Kalinago people survived invasion by the French and British, who forced slavery on the Africans who now make up four-fifths of Dominica’s population, and left a linguistic legacy of English and French-based Creole. If you go to Jamaica for jerk and Trinidad for roti, you go to Dominica for green stuff: flower teas, bush rums. The forest overflows with healing herbs.

Perhaps recognising the futility of pushing against the earth’s generosity, the Jungle Bay hotel leans into nature instead, set bang in the middle of the forests of Soufrière. I arrive late to find the kitchen closed. However, I get a sense of Dominica’s warm welcome when the operations manager, Joanne Hilaire, assures me that they never let guests go to bed hungry. While I sip a cool ginger-lime drink – delicious and ubiquitous on the island – the chef whips up an off-menu late dinner of exquisitely stewed beans with taro, rice and plantain. The next morning I discover that the doors of my villa open onto a private veranda with a rolling vista of Soufrière Bay, towards the southwest edge of Dominica, where the Caribbean Sea meets the Atlantic. For the rest of my stay, I leave my blinds open and let the sun wake me.

The landscape I can see is part of the Soufrière Scotts Head Marine Reserve, where an extinct volcanic crater forms a steep drop-off that’s uniquely close to the shore, creating a warm, nearly 500-foot-deep pool protected from the waves. This makes it a home base for one of the world’s leading free-diving platforms, and a scuba diving haven. As someone who grew up on the coast of West Africa, it pains me to confirm that the waters here have the clearest, bluest depths I have seen. However, the intimacy with nature that Dominica allows also reveals the damage wreaked by global warming. Simon Walsh of Nature Island Dive has been diving in Soufrière for three decades and tells me that rises in ocean temperature are -bleaching its coral reefs. It's a challenge he considers more daunting than the stony coral tissue loss disease his team are battling in the reserve. There, they collaborate with the government to treat affected reefs during dives, applying an amoxicillin paste to slow down the disease.

The ravaging of the coral is out of sync with the environment’s natural cycles of destruction and repair. On the Syndicate Nature Trail, Dominica’s best-known ornithologist, Bertrand Jno Baptiste (known as Dr Birdy), shows me where large trees were uprooted by Category 5 Hurricane Maria in 2017, and how quickly new trees have grown in their wake. Stepping through patches of sunlight dappling the forest floor, he points out a brown trembler as he leads me to a viewing point overlooking a lush valley with the Picard River running through it. Gliding by are a majestic broad-winged hawk, a red-necked parrot and a blue-headed hummingbird. And across the river, dipping in and out of a hanging nest, a Lesser Antillean euphonia bird stuns in blue, yellow and green.

Carla Armour knows the fury of Hurricane Maria. At a sundowner at her art-filled Harmony Villa in the valley of the Morne Trois Pitons, she shows me the shattered remnants of a dormer window on her extensive grounds, where the air is cool enough to merit a jacket. A connector extraordinaire, Armour has gathered a cross-section of Dominican society to save me from driving across the island, which takes deceptively long to traverse because of its mountainous terrain. I meet Jacqueline Andre, a forestry worker and founder of a steel pan band, and Marica Honychurch, a fashion photographer who has turned to fine art photography to explore the surreal potential of the natural world here. Honychurch is one of several younger Dominicans I meet who have left careers abroad and returned home. I tell them how enthralling it has been to discover the Trafalgar Falls, where I sat on a rock between twin cascades and let the water wash my feet; or the Wotten Waven region, where I unwound in the shade of the Ti Kwen Glo Cho hotel and marvelled at how the owners mix cool river water with hot sulphur spring water to create restorative pools. However, I confess, I don’t know if I could handle living with the reality of hurricanes. Jeanelle Brisbane, a US- and British-trained ecologist, challenges my idea of the weather as a threat. “If you take humans out of the equation, these are not really destructive events,” she says. “Hurricanes often carry nutrients and genetic material beneficial to wildlife.” It is a perspective that might explain the ease and resilience of the locals.

Hurricane Maria comes up again when I visit the Jacko Steps, an impressive stairway carved into the sheer face of a cliff in the village of Belles. It is part of an extensive Maroon camp, set up by Africans who had escaped enslavement in the 1760s, led by a West African man of the same name (Jacko is probably a corruption of the Mande name Diako). Eunice George, a Rastafarian, guides me and Armour, and hands us fresh coconuts while explaining that she came to live by the storied encampment after literally following her late husband there. She took a liking to him when he passed by her village, a three-hour walk away, and thought she’d see where he was headed. They were married for more than 40 years until his death. She points out fallen tree trunks that he had to clear to restore access to the historical site. On either side of the path she has planted Japanese laurels, their distinctive variegated leaves acting as living markers for hikers. “I sweep the leaves each time I pass,” she says, “otherwise you can’t tell where there are holes. It’s dangerous.” George belies her age, moving assuredly through the forest to the cliff edge, where she proceeds down the steps with the grace of an Asante dancer, while I pause to ponder my mortality. It is easy to see how this plateau served as a sanctuary. When we reach the bottom, standing in the clear swell of the Layou River, she points out the cliffs and, just above the water’s surface, the caverns that were used as hiding places. Armour has visited the Jacko Steps before, but she is as awed as I am, although less distracted by the land crabs that wander almost everywhere, one disappearing beneath a rock as we take a swim.

Anne Jno Baptiste, a native New Yorker in her 90s, has been in Dominica since 1961. When I visit her at her Papillote Wilderness Retreat, the first eco-lodge in the country when it opened in 1969, she asks: “Where else would I go?” It is hard to argue with her after taking in the surroundings: an expanse of begonias, hibiscus, bromeliads, wild ginger, lobster claw, orchids and aroids blooming in the shade of calabash, breadfruit and tree ferns. Denroy Davis, my Jamaican guide for the Indian River (the filming location for Calypso’s house in Pirates of the Caribbean), tells me that he stayed because of Hurricane Maria, out of admiration for the spirit of the people here. As we glide up the river under the canopy of imposing bwa mang trees, he nods at the ruins of a railway bridge, a victim of time and elemental turbulence. Just beyond, he shows me how quickly the trees have recovered. “You can’t fight nature,” he murmurs.

It is easy to forget that the native kalinago people lived on Dominica before the Europeans arrived, and bestowed its original name of Waitukubuli. I trek to Victoria Falls with Nahgie Laflouf, a Dominican of Syrian heritage who has hiked the mountains and swum in the rivers since he was 11. Afterwards, he takes me into Salybia, a hamlet in the northeast, where an Indigenous healer, Mabrika, performs a cleansing ceremony on me beside the picturesque Isulukati Waterfall.

Old building techniques are evidenced here, such as low-lying, steep-sloped roofs. We see the same methods in use when we stop to buy some mangoes at The Farmacy. It’s run by Ron Mello – another returnee – a fashion model who left New York in 2008 to sell organic produce from the back of a rented truck. He offers everything from roasted breadfruit to snake oil. Rising languidly from sorting coffee beans, he leads us to the back of his property where he has built lodgings into the slopes, just as the Kalinago did centuries before. Inside, they are spacious and panelled with dried, varnished palm bark. Before I leave, Mello sells me some bwa bandé, a putative aphrodisiac.

Driving across the island to catch an ad hoc live reggae performance on Mero Beach, I feel a sudden urge to climb a coconut tree, the way I used to during my childhood in Accra. I’m not sure if it’s because of the cleansing ceremony or the bwa bandé tucked into my backpack. On the beach, with the musicians warming up and a low-lying rainbow framing the sunset, an invite from Armour pops up on my phone: a party the next day at Batibou Beach.

In Dominica, it feels like you walk directly from forest to sea with the flora barely seeming to transition, the balance of species shifting slightly towards sea grape and palm without any of them disappearing. I note this quirk again as I arrive at Batibou. Armour is there, and Honychurch, from the sundowner a few days earlier, is frolicking in the sea with her two young children. Everyone else is a new face but, soon, in the easy way of Dominicans, we are hanging out or, as they say, liming. Food arrives on palm leaves, rum is mixed into coconut juice still in the shells. The water is calm enough to wade into without breaking the flow of our chat. Jeffrey Asiedu, a lodge owner, tells me he was born in Germany before his mother moved back to Dominica, so he was raised between the two countries. Artist Edward Collins explains that he was studying in Texas, but returned to Dominica to make art. No one here takes their island for granted. They each have favourite hikes, special rivers and personal hot springs.

Perhaps this is what the unpredictability of natural disasters confers on the people who live with them. While we visitors can sidestep hurricane season, and imbibe the bounty of the island without experiencing the full gamut of its temper, the locals embrace it all. Honychurch’s children, cavorting at the edge of the water, take Dominica as is. I raise a hand to wave at them and, in that same instant, a wave rises and knocks us all forward, as if to remind us that, while nature is giving, it is not always serene. If Dominica’s temper were tamed, it would stop being the marvel that it is.

To find out more about the island, visit discoverdominica.com

Where to stay in Dominica

Secret Bay

A smart constellation of boutique villas built into the wooded hills of St John Parish, this is a place to kick back in a warm outdoor pool and sip a chilled Kubuli beer, gazing at the outline of the twin humps of Cabrits National Park. Food at the Zing Zing restaurant skews both local and international – the quinoa salad with chicken is a winner – but the clincher is that guests can have a chef come to their villa and cook for them.

Harmony Villa

Set on a hill on the edge of Dominica’s Central Forest Reserve, and filled with art and books, Harmony Villa gives new meaning to the idea of letting the outside in. When the doors are open, the birds – including emerald hummingbirds – flit in and out of the wide veranda, chirping along stairs that lead to spacious, eclectically designed rooms.

Jungle Bay

The hotel’s creator, Sam Raphael, has built a sprawling retreat with a grounded charm, where his 89-year-old father often tends the herb garden or picks fruit and vegetables for sublime locavore meals. Nature-inspired spa treatments are central, and many guests come for yoga or freediving retreats. Breakfast is a treat – especially the shredded saltfish, along with local teas and fruits from the grounds – as are lunches of escovitch fish, and stewed-goat dinners.

Where to eat in Dominica

Steak House

Run by Antigua-trained chef Felicia Williams, this restaurant and lounge has a reputation for delicious interpretations of local cuisine. There’s a broad choice of bush rums, and the bar staff are keen to wow with bespoke cocktails, but they also do a classic Guadeloupe-style Ti’ punch. I ate a divine red snapper stuffed with shrimp, accompanied by vegetables and crinkle-cut taro chips, delivered by Williams herself.

Website: instagram.com

Flavours Grill

Tucked behind the Republic Bank in the capital, Roseau, this place usually has a lunchtime queue during the week, but that allows time to survey the spread of food behind its glass counters. Many order stewed fish with boiled breadfruit, followed by banana pie, known colloquially as fig pie.

Website: 28 Hillsborough Street, Roseau

Zeb Zepis Bistro

At this farm-to-table outfit, New York-trained Trinidadian chef Eileen Prescod creates a fusion of Dominican, greater Caribbean and French food. The fresh, vegetable-forward menu changes daily, but many of the ravishing desserts tend to stay, including a signature spiced rum chocolate cake.

Website: instagram.com