Things to do in Martinique: Saint-Pierre, Mount Pelée, Joséphine's birthplace and rum

Martinique is a mountainous volcanic island in the Windward Islands, and it’s part of France. That shapes almost everything about a visit: French and Creole on the street, the euro in your wallet, and a Creole culture of music, food and writing all its own. The things to do in Martinique run from the ruins of Saint-Pierre, the city a volcano destroyed in 1902, to the sugar estate where Napoleon’s empress was born, the rum distilleries, and the beaches of the south. It’s also the island of Aimé Césaire, one of the most important writers the Caribbean has produced. Below: what to see, what a cruise stop can cover, and the history, told plainly.

Martinique, Caribbean, at a glance

Martinique covers 1,128 square kilometers, about four times the size of Antigua, with about 350,000 people. Fort-de-France is the capital. Officially it’s an overseas department and region of France and an outermost region of the EU, though it’s outside the Schengen Area. French is the official language; virtually everyone also speaks Martinican Creole. The currency is the euro. The airport is named for Aimé Césaire. For current opening times and events, Martinique Tourism is the official site.

The Kalinago name for the island is usually given as Madinina, “island of flowers”; one historian gives Jouanacaëra, “island of iguanas.” Columbus landed on 15 June 1502. The French claimed it in 1635, when Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc landed at Saint-Pierre on 15 September.

The best things to do in Martinique

What	Where	Time to allow	Why go
Saint-Pierre and the 1902 Memorial	North, below Mount Pelée	Half day	Ruins and museum of the 1902 eruption
Mount Pelée and the northern forests	North	A full day to hike	UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2023
Domaine de La Pagerie	Les Trois-Îlets	1–2 hours	Joséphine’s birthplace and museum
Fort-de-France	Capital	Half day	La Savane, the Bibliothèque Schœlcher
A rhum agricole distillery	Several around the island	1–2 hours	The only rum with an AOC
Les Salines	Sainte-Anne peninsula, far south	Half day or more	A beach day

If you only have time for one, I’d make it Saint-Pierre. Nothing else on our route tells a story like it.

Saint-Pierre and the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée

Saint-Pierre was Martinique’s main town and its commercial heart in 1902, with about 28,000 people, many of them refugees from earlier ash falls. Mount Pelée had been active since late April. At about 8:02 on the morning of 8 May 1902, a pyroclastic surge, a cloud of superheated gas and ash the French call a nuée ardente, swept down the mountain and over the town. About 28,000 people died in Saint-Pierre, and about 29,000 across the eruption as a whole, which ran until 1905. It was the deadliest eruption of the 20th century. Ships in the harbor burned; the cable ship Grappler sank with all hands.

The best-known survivor is Ludger Sylbaris, a prisoner held in a windowless cell. Léon Compère-Léandre, at the edge of town, also survived, and the old story of “only two survivors” isn’t accurate; several others escaped with burns.

The museum to visit is the Mémorial de la catastrophe de 1902 – Musée Frank A. Perret. The American volcanologist Frank Perret founded it in 1933, which makes it Martinique’s oldest museum. After seven years of renovation by the Fondation Clément it reopened on 8 May 2019, the eruption’s anniversary, with a new focus on the people of the town rather than only the geology. Adult entry was €8 when it reopened; check Martinique Tourism for current hours and prices.

For a book, Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890) describes Saint-Pierre twelve years before it was destroyed, and it’s free on Project Gutenberg.

Mount Pelée and the Pitons of northern Martinique

Mount Pelée, at 1,397 meters, is the island’s highest point. In September 2023 UNESCO added the “volcanoes and forests of Mount Pelée and the pitons of northern Martinique,” particularly the Pitons du Carbet, to the World Heritage list. The whole island, land and sea, has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2021. If you plan to hike Pelée, go with a local guide and check conditions first. It’s an active volcano, not a park trail.

La Pagerie: where Joséphine was born

Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, later the Empress Joséphine, was born in 1763 on her family’s sugar estate at Les Trois-Îlets. (Some historians have argued she was born on St Lucia, but La Pagerie is the usual answer.) She married Alexandre de Beauharnais in 1779, survived prison during the Terror, married Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796, and became Empress of the French in 1804. The marriage was dissolved in 1810 because she had no children with Napoleon, and she died at Malmaison in 1814.

The Domaine de La Pagerie is now a museum, set in the estate’s old kitchens, with a three-hectare park, a mill and the ruins of her birth house, which are a listed historic monument. The museum also runs programs about slavery on the estate.

Joséphine is a hard figure on Martinique, and you should know why before you go. Her family’s estate was a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people. Her statue in Fort-de-France was vandalized in 1991 and torn down in 2020 by protesters who believed she had influenced Napoleon’s 1802 law restoring slavery in the French colonies.

Fort-de-France

The capital’s main sights are La Savane, the central park; the Bibliothèque Schœlcher, a library designed by Pierre-Henri Picq, associated with the 1889 Paris Exposition, then taken apart and shipped to Martinique to be rebuilt (yes, the whole building); and Picq’s cathedral. The library is named for Victor Schœlcher, one of the abolitionists whose campaigning helped end slavery in the French colonies in 1848.

Rhum agricole

Martinique’s rum is made from fresh sugar-cane juice, not molasses, a style called rhum agricole. In 1996 Rhum de la Martinique was granted an appellation d’origine contrôlée, and France’s appellation authority, the INAO, says it’s the only rum in the world with one. It comes as white rum, rum aged in wood (élevé sous bois), and aged rum (vieux). Worth remembering, standing in a distillery: the cane fields were the plantations.

Beaches

Les Salines, on the Sainte-Anne peninsula at the far south, is the beach most visitors have heard of. Diamant beach, on the south coast, looks out at Diamond Rock just offshore.

Things to do in Martinique from a cruise ship

Cruise ships call at Fort-de-France, the capital, with La Savane and the Bibliothèque Schœlcher in the town center. Les Trois-Îlets (for La Pagerie) and Saint-Pierre in the north are excursions. Some ships, including Star Clippers’ sailing ships, also stop at a beach for the day.

On the Royal Clipper’s Windward route, the Martinique stop is listed simply as “Beach, Martinique,” and Star Clippers’ description is of white sand and clear water. Our trip, Mermaids, Pirates and Poets (Caribbean Sail), calls there on Friday 21 January 2028, the last island day before we sail back to Barbados. Star Clippers hasn’t said which beach yet. If it’s near Saint-Pierre, the 1902 Memorial is within reach; if it’s near Les Trois-Îlets, La Pagerie is; if neither, it’s a beach day, and after a week of ports that’s fine by me. I’ll say which once we know. (Star Clippers’ other January 2028 route, the Grenadines sailings, calls at Fort-de-France in the morning and a beach in the afternoon.) I haven’t sailed this route yet, so this guide is drawn from published sources, not my own visit.

Books, films and music from Martinique

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008). Born in Basse-Pointe, Césaire studied in Paris, where he met Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas; together they founded the Négritude movement, and Césaire is credited with coining the word. His book-length poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) was first published in 1939 and reissued in 1947 with an introduction by André Breton. Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is his famous attack on European colonialism. Back home he taught in Fort-de-France, where Frantz Fanon was one of his students, and he was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001 and a deputy in the French National Assembly for decades. He received a state funeral in 2008, the airport was renamed for him in 2007, and a plaque honors him in the Panthéon in Paris.

Joseph Zobel, Black Shack Alley (La Rue Cases-Nègres, 1950). A semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up among Black cane workers in 1930s Martinique, whose grandmother fights to keep him in school. Euzhan Palcy’s film of it, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), won the Silver Lion and three other awards at the Venice Film Festival and the César for best first film. Darling Légitimus, who played the grandmother, won Best Actress at Venice. If you watch one film before the trip, make it this one.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (1992). Born in Fort-de-France in 1953, Chamoiseau won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top fiction prize, for this novel of a Martinican family from slavery to the 1980s.

Music. Zouk, the French Caribbean dance music, was made famous by the band Kassav’, formed in Guadeloupe in 1979, with the guitarist Jacob Desvarieux among its founders.

Black Shack Alley and Sugar Cane Alley are both on our group’s reading and film list for this trip.

Martinique history, plainly

• Before Europeans: the Kalinago, who knew the island as Madinina.
• 1635: French colonization begins at Saint-Pierre.
• Sugar and slavery: Martinique’s plantations, La Pagerie among them, ran on the forced labor of enslaved Africans for more than two centuries.
• 23 May 1848: the decree abolishing slavery takes effect in Martinique, the day after an uprising of the enslaved, and after abolitionist campaigns in which Victor Schœlcher played a leading part.
• 8 May 1902: Mount Pelée destroys Saint-Pierre.
• 1946: Martinique becomes a French department, under a law Césaire helped pass.
• 2023: Mount Pelée and the northern pitons join the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The full timeline, with what was going on in the islands next door and further afield, is further down the page.

Where Martinique fits on our route

Martinique is the last island on the Royal Clipper’s Windward route, after Dominica, Antigua, St Kitts and the Îles des Saintes. Just to the south is St Lucia; see our guide to the St Lucia Pitons. And one more Martinique connection: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s mother, Annette, is from Martinique.