Exploring the Peaceful Characarare Island

Characharare Island is peaceful and pretty but has a long history of different activities but many locals think it is full of ghosts.

Characharare Island

Getting away from the Chaguaramas inlet and out to the nearby islands was great. There are very few boats out at Characharare Island. Occasionally there is a tourist boat on the weekends but generally, there are only a couple of yachts. Peaceful day and night. Unfortunately, when you do go ashore at some of the favourite stops there is rubbish everywhere so the locals do not seem to treat the area with the respect it should have.

This blog is a photo essay of the beauty and peacefulness of the island which is good for the soul after the hustle, bustle, and noise of Chaguaramas.

The beaches in the area are all pebbles but the colours are beautiful, and the landscape around the bay has many areas of folded ground creating fascinating patterns.

Ruins

Characharare Island was established as a leper colony and then when the colony was shut down all the buildings were deserted. The buildings were once built very well. Now they are just shells, some of which are used by day trippers and rubbish is left everywhere. The ruins are still fascinating to explore and see how much construction was there at one time. There were several large buildings as part of a nunnery for the nurses and there were also two large houses for the doctors on the island, each in its own little bay. Here is some of the history if you are interested https://www.caribbeanmemoryproject.com/placememory-chacachacare.html

Birds

We enjoyed the many varieties of birds on the island and if we had stayed longer there we would have taken many more photos. At least we had a couple of days watching with fascination many different species. There is a website to help identify the local birds https://ttfnc.org/.

Sunset

On the final night on the island, we walked over to the other side of the island which faces to the west and Venezuela. The beach was sheltered and there was no one there. There were little birds chasing insects on the beach and the pelicans flying over the water. As the sun set there was a rig being towed out to sea. A beautiful and peaceful spot.

Friends

We met Mark & Marie this year and it is great to have friends to cruise with as they went to Characharare Is, Chaguaramas, and later Tobago and Martinique.

We needed to go back to Chaguaramas to check out before we headed to Tobago. they have very complicated procedures here and even though it is the same country you need to check out with customs and immigration – more paperwork. As we sailed up the channel it was back to civilisation. There are not only yachts here but all sorts of oil rig support ships, day and night they are visible.

One of the most enterprising of the cruisers has built a staircase to his yacht, put rocks around the water edge for a beach and advertised it on AirBnB as “A unit on the waterfront”. We wondered how many visitors he was getting.

We completed the required paperwork and then sailed down the channel past the naval yards and out to sea.

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