3 Best Sights in Guadeloupe

This fascinating Creole museum in a renovated bungalow houses information and graphics relating to Guadeloupe's earliest inhabitants, as well as some pirate artifacts. Rooms are furnished with antiques and collectibles that depict island life during various eras through the 1950s. Devoted to Creole culture, the museum also doubles as an art gallery, with attractive contemporary paintings by island artists. This labor of love displays furnishings and descriptives owned by a French "culture lover," Vincent Nicaudie. The gift shop carries quality Marie-Galante logo T-shirts and caps, beachwear, and island food products. Also, this is a Wi-Fi hot spot.

This museum is a labor of love by its creators. Seeing the dress of black, white, and métisseé (mixed-race, or "maroon") societies is a fascinating way to visualize the island's tumultuous history and fascinating heritage. Items that you will remember: madras headdresses, baptism outfits, embroidered maternity dresses, colonial pith helmets, and other various chapeaux, as well as the doll collection. Make sure to go out back and visit the replica of a Guadeloupean case circa 1920. A film depicts life of yesteryear. The small museum is privately owned; the founder, Camelia Bausivoir, is a retired English teacher and can act as your guide. The collection was accrued over decades, and Bausivoir sewed many of the costumes. Call for directions before you go and also to make sure that a school group is not there.

From the riverfront Musée du Café/Café Chaulet, dedicated to the art of coffee making, the tantalizing aroma of freshly ground beans reaches out to the highway. Plaques and photos illustrate the island's coffee history. You will learn that coffee was once Guadeloupe's principal crop and that Chaulets have been planters and exporters since 1900. The shop sells excellent arabica coffee, rum punches, Schrubb (an orange liqueur), hot sauces, sachets of spices, bay-rum lotion, marmalades, and jewelry made from natural materials. Cocoa beans are also grown here. The "resident" chocolate maker, a young Frenchwoman, also crafts bonbons and festive holiday candies with lots of dark chocolate and tropical fruit from the island. You will even see the coffee cars—emblazoned Volkswagen Beetles. The Chaulet family respects traditional procedures while bowing to modernity. Their latest product is coffee capsules.