Grenada

Grenada is the Spice Island — the world's second largest producer of nutmeg, and an island whose interior smells of cinnamon, cloves and mace from the plantations that cover the mountainous terrain. It is one of the Caribbean's most authentic destinations — less developed than its neighbors, genuinely warm in its hospitality and possessed of a natural beauty that ranges from the extraordinary pink sand of Horseshoe Bay to the rainforest waterfalls of the interior.

St. George's, the capital, is consistently cited as the most beautiful harbor town in the Caribbean — a horseshoe bay surrounded by hills of pastel houses, a French and British colonial fort, and a market that sells the island's famous spices in every form imaginable. The underwater world around Grenada is equally spectacular — the Bianca C wreck, the largest in the Caribbean, rests in 50 meters of water off St. George's and has become an extraordinary artificial reef.

Grenada was invaded by the United States in 1983 in one of the most unusual episodes in Caribbean history — an event that the Grenadian people discuss with a complex mixture of emotions that reveals much about the island's relationship with its own identity and the larger world.