Grenada Geography, Climate & Nature

Grenada is the southernmost of the Windward Islands, an archipelago of the main island, Carriacou and Petite Martinique and a scatter of islets that form the southern third of the Grenadines, about 160 kilometres north of Venezuela and some 100 miles north of Trinidad, directly south of Saint Vincent. The country covers 344 square kilometres with 114,621 people; the main island has 121 kilometres of coastline and a landmass that rises from a narrow coastal plain in a north-south axis of ridges and narrow valleys to Mount St. Catherine at 840 metres, a weathered stratovolcano. The island emerged from a shallow sea as a submarine volcano about two million years ago and its cones are long dormant; what remains are explosion craters -- Grand Etang, the largest crater lake, Lake Antoine and Levera Pond -- hot springs, and the horseshoe harbour of St. George's, itself an old crater. The only active volcano is Kick 'em Jenny, a seamount eight kilometres north of the island whose summit lies 185 metres below the surface, ringed by a maritime exclusion zone.

Rivers run swift and short off the conic slopes, occasionally flooding and bringing landslides, and feed the waterfalls -- Annandale nearest the capital, Concord Falls, Tufton Hall the highest, the Seven Sisters below Grand Etang. Rainfall varies from more than 3,500 millimetres on the windward mountainsides to under 1,500 in the lowlands, heaviest from June to November.

St. George's, the capital, faces west on the sheltered coast with Grand Anse Beach and the airport at Point Salines, about five miles south, beside it; Gouyave, Grenville and Sauteurs are the other towns. Carriacou, the largest of the Grenadines with 6,000 people, has Hillsborough as its only town and the ferry dock at Tyrell Bay; Petite Martinique lies four kilometres further with 900.

Grenada's climate is tropical, hot and humid in the dry season and cooled by moderate rain in the wet one; temperatures average 29 degrees all year, ranging from 22 to 32 and rarely falling below 18, with slightly higher readings in the lowlands and appreciable day-night swings. Rain comes on the moisture-laden north-east trades and varies enormously with altitude and aspect, from more than 3,500 millimetres a year on the windward mountainsides to less than 1,500 in the lowlands; the wettest months are June through November, with humidity near 80 per cent, and December through May is drier, humidity between 68 and 78.

The island lies at the southern edge of the main development region for tropical cyclones and had only four landfalling hurricanes in several decades, but they were severe: Janet on 22 September 1955 killed 500; Ivan on 7 September 2004, after 49 hurricane-free years, damaged 90 per cent of the homes as a Category 3; Emily struck the north in July 2005; and Beryl, on 1 July 2024, the earliest Category 5 on record, hit Carriacou as a strong Category 4 and cut power to 95 per cent of the country. The season runs from early June to the end of November. The island is in an active seismic zone, tremors are occasionally felt, and Kick 'em Jenny's alert level is published.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Grenada, like most of the Caribbean, is poor in large animals -- native opossums and armadillos, introduced mona monkeys and mongooses -- and rich in birds: 199 species recorded by June 2024, one of them endemic, the Grenada dove, the national bird since 1991 and one of the most critically endangered doves in the world, a bird of the dry south-western scrub. The interior is rainforest around Grand Etang's crater lake and the 840-metre Mount St. Catherine, cut by short swift rivers and the waterfalls they make; the coast has mangrove and, on Carriacou, the Isle of Reefs, some of the least disturbed coral in the region with 33 dive sites on the calmer Caribbean side.

The reefs off the main island were damaged by Ivan in 2004 and Emily in 2005; only 10 to 15 per cent of the seabed there is solid enough for coral to grow on, and hard coral takes between 10 and 80 years, which is why Jason deCaires Taylor sank his concrete figures in Molinere Bay in 2006 as the world's first underwater sculpture park, to draw divers off the natural reef and give coral a substrate. Kick 'em Jenny, the active seamount to the north, sits inside a monitored exclusion zone.

No fuller species inventory was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The animals a visitor may see are the mona monkeys at Grand Etang, where they are used to people, the armadillo and opossum, called tattoo and manicou, rarely and at night, the mongoose everywhere, and the birds -- the Grenada dove only with luck and a guide in the south-west dry forest. Underwater is the richer show: the reefs on Carriacou's Caribbean side, and at Molinere Bay the ring of children holding hands and the other figures, now colonised by coral and fish, that a snorkeller can float over.

The practical zoology is the advisories': rabies is common in dogs and some wildlife including bats, chikungunya is carried by mosquitoes, and coastal currents and rip tides are common where most beaches have no lifeguard.