The island, which looks like a fat dark-green poblano pepper dropped upside down in the middle of the Caribbean, is rugged and volcanic, vivid with rain forest, cascades, gorges, and fertile valleys. One of the first things you notice is how the island's perspective is all vertical—the hills are high sharp thrusts, the hotels climb the hillsides, in the car or on hikes and bike rides you go up and then down. The coast is squiggly with bays and harbors and coves, beaches of black and yellow sands framing small rivers that run into the sea between cliffs and hills. Indeed, the intensity of the landscape forces engagement; unlike on flat open islands, where your mind can go on vacation, St. Lucia makes you think about its depths and want to learn the secrets of its history.

The island's most important towns—including Soufrière, the capital under French rule, and Castries, the capital today—as well as its best harbors and many of its spare and lovely fishing villages, are on the west, or Caribbean, side. The center of the island is not only mountainous but thick with rain forest; it has always seemed close to impenetrable. Until the creation of passable roads, getting around the island was easiest by sea; even today, water taxis are as common as any other mode of transportation. The first main road, built in 1786, was described sixty years later as the only useful one on the island. Road construction here is challenging and expensive because of the terrain and the rain; it still takes a long time to drive on the roads connecting east and west, north and south, which only started to appear in the 1960s.

Development, too, tends to hug the coast, where the topography provides lots of privacy in addition to extraordinary views. An explosion of foreigners building and buying second homes opened the tourism market, according to the minister of tourism (and hotelier and chair of the Caribbean Tourism Organization), Allen Chastanet. The hotel companies seem to think it's definitely St. Lucia's moment. Resorts from Ritz-Carlton, Raffles, and Westin, scattered around the coast, are currently under construction, as are a number of smaller projects—for instance Cap Maison, a cluster of cushy Spanish-style villas at the northern tip of the island that's opening this month. Until recently, tourism focused on St. Lucia's northwest, above Castries, which has a port that accommodates cruise ships. Reduit Beach helped Rodney Bay become a lively tourism-driven village with a mall, a string of good restaurants and places to have a drink while watching the sunset, and numerous hotels, from Rex Resorts to Chastanet's own Coco Palm and Coco Kreole (he has stepped down from their management) to sleep it off. Land was filled in between Rodney Bay and Pigeon Island in 1970, creating a long strand with a number of hotels, where now RockResorts has opened The Landings, a high-end resort/condo complex.

I had hoped to sit down with Chastanet in person, but he (and practically everyone else I spoke with) was too busy preparing for the arrival of Prince Charles. Word was that Camilla was on Antigua and that the prince was joining her for a bit of a Caribbean tour and, one hopes, a little holiday R and R. I so sympathize with the difficulties of multitasking travel, combining work and vacation! And I can only imagine the nightmare of hosting royalty, when everything really must be just so.