Sejur Saint Lucia

Your perfect honeymoon

Rising like an emerald tooth from the flat Caribbean Sea, St Lucia definitely grabs your attention. Glossed over as some sort of glam honeymoon spot, this mountainous island has much more to offer then just posh digs.
Who says the Caribbean is all about lying on the beach? If that is all you do in St Lucia you are missing out. The rainforest-choked interior is made for hiking; a canopy of green covers the island like a haze. Rolling hills grow to form volcanic mountains and reach to the sky. The iconic Pitons rise from the waves to the clouds like pyramids of volcanic stone. This is not some glammed-up, theme-park holiday spot – St Lucia has a pulse. Your senses are bombarded with the sights, smells and sounds of an island that is truly alive. In Northern St Lucia, Pigeon Island National Park has a history of hostility, but these days, is known for walks and its small sandy beach. Towns like Castries move and shake to the sound of car horns, the smell of rotis fresh from the oven and reggae blaring on the speaker.
Sure you can find a beach to sit on and a nice hotel right beside it. There is great scuba diving to be found under the waves and the sailing is top notch. But it is much more than that. If you are looking for a Caribbean destination that will let you get under the skin of West Indian life – St Lucia is the one.
St. Lucia (Loo-sha) is becoming overly developed with far too many all-inclusive resorts, but it retains much of its pristine beauty. Its nearest competitor is Barbados, which has been overdeveloped longer than anyone cares to remember. Fortunately, St. Lucia still has smaller inns of charm and grace if you shun the activity-loaded agendas of those all-inclusives with their groaning buffet tables and raucous guests loaded with too many tropical punches.
The heaviest tourist development is concentrated in the northwest, between the capital, Castries, and the northern end of the island, where there is a string of white-sand beaches and a tourist colony (Rodney Bay Village) that is among the most accessorized for holiday playtime on the island.
The rest of St. Lucia remains relatively unspoiled, a checkerboard of green-mantled mountains, valleys, banana plantations, a bubbling volcano, wild orchids, and fishing villages. The island has a mixed French and British heritage, but there is a hint of the South Pacific about it as well.
Rising out of the relative obscurity in which it languished for most of the 20th century, St. Lucia is becoming -- postmillennium -- one of the biggest players in Caribbean tourism. Since the dawn of the new century, World Travel Awards has named it the worlds leading honeymoon destination. Local authorities estimate that 36% of the islands business comes from visitors either getting married or else on a honeymoon here. At the same time, Natural History Magazine has honored St. Lucia as one of the 50 top eco-tourism destinations in the world. There are no easy building sites left on St. Lucia. Those that seem relatively flat were built upon many years ago; most that remain require complicated retaining walls, deep foundations, and in most cases, elaborately winding access roads. Expect a lot of huffing and puffing as you navigate your way up and down the islands endless shifts in altitude, and views of oddly shaped, weirdly eroded hills and rock outcroppings that evoke the South China Seas.
A final oddity about St. Lucia: West Indian women frequently claim St. Lucia has some of the Caribbeans best-looking men. Perhaps its the mixture of the French, West Indian, and British gene pools, perhaps its the ongoing exercise from all those changes in elevation. Regardless, St. Lucians are courtly, charming, fun, and in some instances, just a wee bit old-fashioned. Of the many disasters that threaten to engulf St. Lucia, and perhaps the rest of the world as well, what is it they fear the most? As some of them described it to us, its Jamaicanization, or the process of lawlessness and social decay that tends to accompany traffic in illegal drugs.
Oferte speciale Saint Lucia

Sejur Santa Lucia, Caraibe - Iunie 2012 8 zile la 1415 €
ATRACTII

With lovely little towns, beautiful beaches and bays, mineral baths, and banana plantations, you wont tire of exploring St. Lucia.
Petit Piton and Gros Piton. Just north of Soufrière, the twin volcanic cones, Petit Piton and Gros Piton, rise to 771m to 743m, respectively. Visitors climb these 40-million-year-old lush mountains for the greatest views in the southern Caribbean.
Mount Soufrière, near Soufrière, this is a rocky lunar landscape of pits and open craters of boiling sulfur. The experienced likened it to a visit to Dantes Inferno.
Marigot Bay. South of Castries, this west-coast yachties haven is the most beautiful bay in the Caribbean. Some 400 years ago, its palm-lined shore was home to the Carib warriors.
The capital city, Castries, has grown up around its harbor, which occupies the crater of an extinct volcano. Charter captains and the yachting set drift in here, and large cruise ship wharves welcome vessels from around the world. Because several devastating fires destroyed almost all the old buildings, the town today looks new, with glass-and-concrete (or steel) buildings rather than the French colonial or Victorian look typical of many West Indian capitals.
Castries may be architecturally dull, but its public market is one of the most fascinating in the West Indies, and our favorite people-watching site on the island.
One of the most important French-built religious buildings in the West Indies is the Cathedral, immediately to the edge of the park. Built during the 19th century of wrought iron, cast iron, and stone under the supervision of several generations of hard-working, long-suffering priests, its covered with an almost surreal mélange of French Catholic and West Indian iconography.
To the south of Castries looms Morne Fortune, the inappropriately named Hill of Good Luck. Government House, now the official residence of the governor-general of St. Lucia, is one of the few examples of Victorian architecture that escaped destruction by fire. The private gardens are beautifully planted, aflame with scarlet and purple bougainvillea. Morne Fortune also offers what many consider the most scenic lookout perch in the Caribbean. The view of the harbor of Castries is panoramic: You can see north to Pigeon Island or south to the Pitons; on a clear day, you may even spot Martinique. To reach Morne Fortune, head east on Bridge Street.
Pigeon Island National Historic Park is St. Lucias first national park is joined to the mainland by a causeway. On its west coast are two white-sand beaches. Theres also a restaurant, Jambe de Bois, named after a wooden-legged pirate who once used the island as a hideout.
Pigeon Island got its name from the red-neck pigeon, or ramier, that once colonized this island in huge numbers.
Rodney Bay. This scenic bay is a 15-minute drive north of Castries. Set on a man-made lagoon, it has become a chic center for nightlife, hotels, and restaurants, in fact, its the most active place on the island at night.
Marigot Bay. Movie crews, including those for Sophia Lorens Fire Power, have used this bay, one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean, for background shots.
Nearby Soufriereare the Diamond Mineral Baths in the Diamond Botanical Gardens. Deep in the lush tropical gardens is the Diamond Waterfall, one of the geological attractions of the island. Created from water bubbling up from sulfur springs, the waterfall changes colors (from yellow to black to green to gray) several times a day.
The fertile volcanic soil of St. Lucia sustains a rich diversity of bird and animal life. Some of the richest troves for ornithologists are in protected precincts off the St. Lucian coast, in either of two national parks, Fregate Islands Nature Reserve and the Maria Islands Nature Reserve.
Maria Islands are larger and more arid and are almost constantly exposed to salt-laden winds blowing up from the equator. Set to the east of St. Lucias southernmost tip, off the town of Vieux Fort, their biodiversity is strictly protected. It is home to more than 120 species of plants, lizards, butterflies, and snakes that are believed to be extinct in other parts of the world. These include the large ground lizard (Zandolite) and the nocturnal, nonvenomous kouwes snake (Dromicus ornatus).
The Marias are also a bird refuge, populated by such species as the sooty tern, the bridled tern, the Caribbean martin, the red-billed tropicbird, and the brown noddy, which usually nests under the protective thorns of prickly pear cactus.