by Bert Archer
Last updated: 5:50 PM ET, Wed July 2, 2025
One of the downsides of Caribbean travel for Canadians is our tendency to skip the truly local in favour of the paradise angle.
It’s easy to be blinded to the specific when the general miasma of paradise lies so heavily on these islands. The beaches, the weather, the flora, the fauna. And if we’re staying at all-inclusives, we can be doubly insulated from actual island life.
Which is what makes the Savanne des esclaves such a remarkable place.
Conceived, run, and built mainly by a single man, Gilbert Larose, known locally as Ti Gilbé, construction began on the 3-hectare site in 2000, and it opened to the public in 2004.
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On the outskirts of the southwestern village of Trois Ilets, there is not a lot of signage for it, so its status as one of the top four tourist attractions in Martinique relies mostly on word-of-mouth.
Despite numbers and time spans that dwarf the Holocaust, this is not a depressing or finger-pointing place. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about it is how it situates modern-day Martinicans as the descendants not only of enslaved people, but of the colonists, as well as two waves of Indigenous people and latter-day immigrants from India, China, and the Middle East.
The other stand-out quality here is the fact that, by definition, this is all from the point of view of these descendants and their ancestors, a far more Black-centred presentation than North Americans are mostly used to, outside of universities and the deeply affecting bottom floor of the etats-unien National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.
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It is mostly educational, and it is very specifically Martinican, with houses, or “cases” that are meant to be faithful reproductions of the huts in which enslaved people were housed in Martinique.
I’ve posted some of the compelling signage on the TravelPulse Québec Instagram page, which you can check for some informational highlights.
The biggest revelation for me was the fact that there were riots that led directly to the freeing of enslaved people in May of 1848, the same year people across Europe were throwing off their own bonds of monarchy and imperialism. Though not quite on the level of Haiti’s earlier successful slave revolt that threw Napoleon’s army (led by his brother-in-law) out of Haiti, these riots actually happened after the official liberation of the slaves across the French Caribbean in April of the same year, news of which has reached Martinicans, who were worried the colonists there were not going to obey the new edict. People rioted on May 22, and the governor proclaimed abolition the next day.
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As an aside, May would be an excellent time to visit Martinique. It’s the month they celebrate not only this anniversary but also commemorate the May 8, 1902 eruption of Mt Pelee, which killed all but one of the 28,000 inhabitants of St. Pierre, where those riots had taken place 54 years earlier.
There are beaches, lovely hotels, and an excellent Club Med in Martinique. The fish is uniformly excellent, and the rum almost entirely agricole (made directly from sugar cane as opposed to molasses), unlike most of the rest of the Caribbean (and the world).
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There are a lot of reasons to visit this stridently francophone island, and about a million of us do (half of us by cruise ship). But only 10,000 of us stop by the Savane des Esclaves. Let’s see if we can’t get that number up.
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