The Baths

There are many things in the beautiful British Virgin Islands that are wonders to behold, but, when it comes to the things one ‘must see’, The Baths is pretty much at the top of our list.
I can remember the first time Ida and I walked through the trails there. I couldn’t help thinking that this must be part of a movie set for Indiana Jones.

The Baths is at the south end of the Island of Virgin Gorda. The best way to describe this site might be to ask you to imagine a bunch of boulders, some the size of an average house, piled precariously atop one another… as though they just kind of fell out of the sky. Just how they all got there is something of a matter of conjecture. I envisioned this huge volcanic eruption, with these boulders being shot up several miles in the sky, then all coming tumbling down in a big heap. I like that because it sounds so exciting! But the most popular theory is that molten rock, known as magma, solidified and was pushed up through the earth’s surface, leaving these large, broken pieces of granite all along the water’s edge.

The hiking trail, which wanders through and around these monoliths, takes you through several tidal pools of water, between your ankles and knees in depth. And at the end of the trail you walk out onto Devil’s beach… a beach the likes of which you will never see again, because it’s entirely surrounded by these gigantic rocks. On a good day, you will find many families frolicking in the incredibly clear turquoise water there.

Like so many other sites in these islands, there is more than one version of why it came to be named ‘The Baths’. One has to do with the slave trade back in the 17 and 1800s.

Large groups of blacks were being continuously shipped across the ocean from Africa to the Americas. As one can imagine, this trip was incredibly hard… in fact, there was so much sickness on the passage that many died on the way. It’s a part of our history, that today, is so hard for us to contemplate. Of course, those that did survive the ordeal were in great need of a good cleansing. These poor souls were there to be sold as slaves, and so, in order to fetch the best price for them, one of the things their captors did was to take them there for a ‘Bath’.

Well, that’s only one version, but, whatever you believe, believe this: If you don’t visit The Baths on your vacation there, then you will miss out on something very big!