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Photo by: Zach Stovall

On a hillside in La Pointe, a small village in southwestern St. Lucia, Leo Clifford leads me across uneven ground slick from recent rains. We pick our way past the chattel house she shares with her 82-year-old mother, who appears at a window and calls out a greeting in the French-inflected patois spoken here in Soufrière Quarter. Leo climbs the stone steps into a small outbuilding beside a shade tree. Inside, when my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see hundreds of pottery pieces crowded onto rough-hewed boards lining the walls. Large coal pots clutter the floor, and like the plates, votive holders, pipes and smaller vessels on the shelves, each bears a unique pattern of earth and ash tones from the coconut-husk-fed flames used to fire each creation.

St. Lucia Essentials...

Leo settles onto a low stool near the good light flooding through the doorway and reaches into a pail half-filled with clay. Doing so, she reaches back in time, beyond her mother and mother's mother, who passed down the knowledge of how to make coal pots, all the way back 1,000 years to their Carib ancestors who carried the technology out of the Orinoco and settled here at La Pointe, where they found good soil. Nearly every St. Lucian family cooked with a two-piece coal pot well into the 1970s, when the convenient hiss of propane stoves mostly snuffed out the traditional method of slow-simmering over hardwood charcoal. The pots and stands scattered about Leo's workshop have no buyers, so today she's fashioning miniature versions she hopes to sell to visitors. Leo's practiced hands move quickly. She dug this clay from the ground and pounded it with a huge wooden pestle until it yielded and became workable. In her faded housedress, muddy sandals and bemused expression, Leo, with her rootsy little operation, exemplifies the potential benefit of what some on the island believe is St. Lucia's most important way forward: village tourism. 

The luxe-ing of St. Lucia is well under way, with RockResorts opening the Landings' exquisite new oceanfront and marina suites to join Cap Maison's expansive villa suites - complete with rooftop plunge pools - in competing for the high-end market created by Jade Mountain's three-walled infinity-pool rooms. As in many Caribbean destinations, the recession has a few of St. Lucia's near-future projects shuffling marquees and financing options while bulldozers sit idle, but within a couple years the island will definitely see several top luxury resort chains setting up shop - along with spas and golf courses and villa enclaves. Equally remarkable, though, is the existence of a community-based undercurrent that's beginning to flow beneath this tide of massive, primarily foreign-owned developments.

To witness St. Lucia's village-tourism revolution, I hit the island's vertiginous roadways. It happens with stunning regularity on St. Lucia: Again and again I bank around a hairpin turn, eyes fixed on the road, trying to anticipate which way it will dive, climb or swerve next, only to have my gaze ripped away by another jaw-dropping overlook of a picturesque seaside town - Anse la Raye, Canaries, Soufrière, Choiseul (shwa-ZEL), Laborie, Dennery. When I turn inland, I stumble upon barely-there hamlets hidden amid lushly rainforested hills - Fond Gens Libre, Fond Doux, La Pointe. Each of these villages, I'm told, lies somewhere along a path to becoming a tourist destination. Across the valley from Leo's Carib pottery studio, Jimmy Haynes rallies his troops in Fond Gens Libre's interpretive center. These highly trained mountaineers - Haynes included - descend from a band of runaway slaves and freedmen, the neg mawon, who fought the British in the Brigands' War at the close of the 18th century. The freedom fighters chose a strategic aerie on Gros Piton, the larger of St. Lucia's iconic pair of volcanic plugs, to serve as hide-out between their plantation raids and as lookout to keep tabs on the redcoats. Today, the tiny village of Fond Gens Libre (Valley of the Free People) serves as base camp for hikers attempting to summit the mountain.

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Educated in the U.K. (the Brits won the war), Jimmy Haynes was in the midst of a marketing career with major corporations like BMW when he returned to St. Lucia for a vacation. On a visit to the village where his father was born, Haynes found its 85 residents eking out subsistence from sand mining, logging for charcoal and turtle poaching - just as they'd been doing for 200 years, and all of it destructive to the local ecology. Only two people in the village had gone to secondary school.

"I saw all that and said I'd stay for one month to help," says Haynes. "Then one month turned into two, and two months turned into eight years - and counting."

Today, Haynes - bespectacled and bookish, yet true to his heritage, a bantam rooster when it comes to fighting for his people - owns and manages Gros Piton Tours. The company employs 14 Fond Gens Libre guides, who lead visitors on breathtaking three- to five-hour treks to the top of the 2,500-foot-high peak. Other villagers make crafts or sell souvenirs and meals, with the result that every local family benefits from the business. Haynes also reinvests 50 percent of the profits into the community, outfitting a new computer center, ensuring everyone goes to school, offering college scholarships, and building a small heritage park that includes an outdoor theater for village gatherings. His example has even sparked some local entrepreneurship, and for a tour of Soufrière Quarter's other attractions I enlist Gatson Thompson, a 20-something former mountain guide who climbed up and down Gros Piton enough times to buy a car and start his own transport service.

The case for village tourism is felt particularly strongly in Soufrière. The bulk of St. Lucia's overnight visitors stay, eat and party up north around Rodney Bay. Cruise-ship tourists do their shopping in the capital, Castries. Nearly everyone who arrives on the island, though, travels to Soufrière, drawn to its World Heritage Site, its rainforest, its marine park's diving and snorkeling, its "drive-in" volcano, its natural hot mineral baths and waterfalls, and its plantation gardens. Judging by St. Lucia's promotional ads, even the island's vaunted reputation for romance is built on the inspirationally Freudian views of Soufrière's Pitons. Relatively few tourist dollars, however, make it into the hands of the Quarter's St. Lucians.

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