3 Best Sights in Montserrat

This vantage point—replete with telescope, barbecue grill and tables for picnickers, landscaped grounds, and bathrooms—provides bird's-eye views of the old W. H. Bramble airport and eastern villages damaged by pyroclastic flows.

This once affluent suburb of Plymouth is just north of the former capital and also offers a riveting panorama. You can see the 18th-century sugar mill that once housed the Montserrat Museum and poke around the abandoned Montserrat Springs Hotel, where a few items remain just as they were left on the front desk during the mass exodus in 1997. You might encounter a goat or cow nibbling mushrooms growing through the cracks in the pool and tennis court. The hotel's hot springs are down the hill by the beach, which has grown substantially and was long a favorite liming spot of locals and expats.

The only access to this incredible vantage point over the devastation is across the Belham Valley, through a once-beautiful golf course now totally covered by volcanic mudflow, resembling a lunarscape. Be aware that routes aren't signposted on the rough road, which is often impassable after heavy rains, so it's best to hire an experienced guide. You'll drive through Cork Hill and Weekes, villages for the most part spookily intact (there's no way to provide utilities, though geothermal drilling as an alternate energy source is under way). Close to the summit, the equally eerie, abandoned, stark-white wind-generator project and the giant satellite dishes of the Gem and Antilles radio stations resemble abstract-art installations awaiting completion by Christo. At the top, Ft. St. George contains sparse ruins, including a few cannons, but the overwhelming sight is the panorama of destruction, an unrelenting swath of gray offset by vivid emerald fields and the turquoise Caribbean. If access is ever again unrestricted to St. George's, you may be able to drive partway to Garibaldi Hill, which also affords sweeping vistas of the devastation.