Guadeloupe, nicknamed the Emerald Isle, is actually two islands separated by a narrow seawater channel, the Rivière Salée. The ensemble looks rather like a butterfly with its wings spread over the emerald sea under the blue sky. The prosaic geographical truth is one of great contrast. Grande Terre (which means Big Land but in fact is the lower of the two islands) is a large, rolling limestone plateau. Basse Terre (meaning Low Land) is in fact mainly a high, forestcovered, mountainous and volcanic massif. The whole is connected by an excellent and well-maintained road network, which ensures easy access to everywhere worth seeing.
Guadeloupe’s varied terrain offers a wide choice of leisure pursuits: the forests and waterfalls of the massif for hill walking, the beaches and lagoons for lounging around or swimming, and to top it all, just a few short tacks away are the miniature delights of the smaller islands, each preserving its own unique character.

There’s a huge range of top end hotels in Guadeloupe, mostly in Grande Terre and clustered near the beaches at Gosier and the superb lagoon of St François. On Basse Terre you’ll find simpler places and lots of holiday cottages for rent.
The range of restaurants is as varied as everything else. The happy marriage between Antillean specialties, French cuisine and Indian dishes, helped by easy access to good ingredients, makes Guadeloupe, like Martinique, one of the best places in the Antilles for food.

Around Pointe-à-Pitre, Gosiers and St François restaurants are pretty touristy, though you’ll still find good French and local cuisine at affordable prices. In the less visited areas (Grand Terre’s windward coast, Grand Cul-de-Sac Marin, and Basse Terre’s leeward coast) there are lots of restaurants with local Creole cuisine, in general first class and worth visiting if you make a tour.

Pointe à Pitre

Pointe-à-Pitre is a sub-prefecture and has a population of about 30,000. However, if you add in the suburbs and satellite townships, that rises to about 100,000 folk who call themselves ‘Pointois’ (pronounced Point-wah). Despite the often stifling heat and the noisy traffic jams, which pollute Pointe-à-Pitre, the old town still has some fine places of interest tucked away, their 19th century colonial architecture well worth a visit.

Visit of Guadeloupe and it's nearby dependencies: