Home UpTrinidad 1, Port of Spain
Let's try a transect, moving from Port of Spain to the east coast.
Port of Spain's harbor, with its cruise-ship complex on the right and, on the left, the towers of the central bank and national petroleum corporation.
Warehouses and office buildings.
The city center lies in the mid-distance, where, just left-of-center the steeple of Trinity Cathedral may be discerned.
Coming around to the northeast.
Looking north: we've now made a circuit of more than 180 degrees, and we're back to the water, now on our left. (All these photos were taken from what was in 1995 a Crowne Plaza but which had flown several other flags, as of 2014 Radisson’s.)
The Queen's Royal College, fronting the city-center Queen's Park Savannah. Its best known graduate may be V.S. Naipaul, who wrote of it, painfully, in A House for Mr. Biswas.
Ambard's house, completed in 1904 for himself by Lucien Ambard, an architect for himself. He lost it in in 1919, and the house bounced between owners until 1940, since when it’s stayed in a family. It’s also listed on the national trust Heritage Asset Register as, of course, is the Queen’s Royal College.
World War II transformed Port Of Spain, much to the disgust of the British governor, who saw the tranquil island overrun by presumptuous Yanks who, unfortunately, had Churchills’ support. Here’s one relic of the American presence: an abandoned hangar at the former American base on the north side of Port-of-Spain.
Another: Waller Field, east of Port of Spain and just past Arima. In the early 1940s a steady stream of American military aircraft landed here while flying to North Africa.
Apart from the buildings serving the needs of the island, the British also built on Trinidad the Imperial Agricultural Research Station, midway between Port of Spain and the international airport at Piarco. Opened in the 1920s, this institution trained agricultural officers from around the world. It now houses part of the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies. The college principal in 1931, Geoffrey Evans, noted that the site had the advantage of being “outside the hurricane belt and of not being subject of earthquakes.” That may sound slightly strange, but an earthquake in 1934 destroyed the very grand Imperial Agricultural Research Institute in Bihar, India. Evans had spent most of his career in India and during World War II was acting director at Kew.
Translation: "The way of the cultivator is anything but easy." Is this actually a quote from a classical author? I can’t track it down, though the UWI attributes it to Virgil.
On the hills to the north, coffee and cacao plantations were ultimately destroyed by economics and disease. Some plantation houses survive.
In the far northeast of the island, near Toco, a rural population sought to escape plantation servitude. Some of the houses, though small, are meticulously maintained.
A Toco merchant, selling from behind heavy screens above the counter.
Mondo Nuevo Trace, a road in the forest west of Toco.
A path through the windswept brush at Galera Point, the northeast tip of the island. A lighthouse was erected in 1897 and bears the initials JVR: "Jubilee Victoria Regina."
The surf is not only strong under the northeast trades but dangerous, because the Gulf Stream passes here, ready to carry a swimmer to Barbados and points beyond.
Windswept islands off Point Galera.
