Trinidad 6, Trinidad in 2026

Nice sandy beach at the village of Moruga, on the south coast of Trinidad.

Nice muddy beach near Waterloo, on the west side of the island

You can see why the beaches are different. The muddy one is at the edge of that sunken Caroni Basin.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-Sun-shaded-digital-elevation-model-showing-Trinidads-principal-geomorphic-featuresfig3_228431933

Here's a close-up of the swamp inland from the mud. We're at the north edge of the town of Felicity.

My very own street-view. Let's try facing left.

No strolling in the woods today.

Welcome to red mangrove.

You can cut channels through this stuff.

You can go fishing.

The channel stays open only if you keep it open.

Have people been here long? These coconuts might be natural, but they might have been planted. There's a lot of abandoned farmland on the island.

Abandoned plantations, too, in this case sugarcane, mapped here as it was about a century ago and just inland from the swamps

https://caribbeanhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2018/12/sweet-sorrow-timeline-of-sugar-in.html

The sugarcane was grown on estates, some of which are indicated here, including Felicity at the far left. The most important estate of the estates shown here--it eventually took over all the others in the neighborhood--is Woodford Lodge. (The Chaguanas Tramway carried cane, probably semi-refined, to the coast, but there is no sign of it now, except perhaps a paved drain, nor is there any way to drive or walk to the port that once existed at the mouth of the Rio Chaguanas.)

https://archive.org/details/dr_composite-map-to-sheets-1-2-map-of-the-island-of-trinidad-on-a-scale-of-15010004

Here's the complete map, if you're curious.

https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~340600~90108851:Composite---Sheets-1-2--Map-of-the-

When the tram disappeared, a railroad was built. Here it is in 1925.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/191766699268/posts/10160542973589269/

It's hard to find traces of the railroad today. The most obvious is the former station (now the island's main bus station) in Port of Spain, but here's a more exotic survivor, Knollys Tunnel, just north of Tabaquite. Yes, you can drive through it. It's about 800 feet long. No lights, but no curves,

The island's sugarcane is gone, too, except for feral patches.

I

It's pretty, but pretty impenetrable. Nice saman tree in the background (Samanea saman).

A pomegranate hints at the possible location nearby of a now-vanished Big House, the cane-estate owner's house.

Here's some prime sugarcane land now assigned to other crops, probably vegetables for the local market.

The ruins of the Brechin Castle sugar refinery.

If you look closely under the overhanging platform you can see boiler tubing.

Woodford Lodge in its glory days. The estate expanded from 1,300 acres in 1920 to about 6,000 by 1950, when this photo was taken.

D. Hutchison and M.S. Taylor, compilers, Woodford Lodge, A Sugar Estate in Trinidad, B.W.I, 1950,

The machinery manager and a foreman watching earth-moving operations.

And here's Woodford Lodge's Big House, built in 1921 but still hanging on in the 1990s. The undated painting is "Shadows of the Past" by Ryan Williams.

Anthony de Verteuil, Great Estates of Trinidad (2000), p. 327.

Here's the same Big House in 2026.

Another angle.

And another, this time toward the old sugar factory.

Here's what's on the site now.

Another old wooden house, still on its feet. It's on Longdenville Road at Ratanie Road. Was it "the Big House" of an estate? Dunno.

Rear view.

Another old wooden house, this one at Avoca on the Old Siparia Road. A "big house"? Dunno.

A relic of the Felicity Estate, preserved in the office at Brechin Castle, where there was for one bright shining moment a plan to develop a museum.

Another vestige of the colonial world.

One former estate is now a luxury retreat.

The Big House main room has an extended porch for birdwatching.

Like this.

A sobering listing of the 225 names of the first batch of indentured workers to arrive in Trinidad to work the estates. The Fatel Razack sailed from Calcutta, stopped in South Africa and St. Helena, and arrived after a voyage of slightly over three months.

Murli J. Kirpalani, et al, editors, Indian Centenary Review: One Hundred Years of Progress, 1845-1945, Trinidad, B.W.I., 1945, front matter.

The Mud House Museum, remnant of a cocoa plantation at Avoca.

Here's where it gets it name.

The metal roof is completely separate.

The lighting is modern; the ladder (to the flat roof) is original.

Here's another survivor, this one from the wealthy end of the Indian population in the 1920s. The builder, Pundit Capildeo (1873-1926), began as a laborer on the Woodford Lodge Estate but was released from his contract by a supervisor who recognized that Capildeo was a Brahmin. The young man was soon married to the supervisor's daughter. They moved to a small house on this site, where they opened a shop, offered religious services, and by the 1920s were able to build this, the so-called Lion House, more properly the Anand Bhavan, on the main road in Chaguanas and not far from Felicity and Woodford Lodge. In 1926 Capildeo returned to India, got sick, and died. The details are delicate, but the house survived with his widow in charge until her death in 1952. Since then, it's gradually decayed, one hears because the inheritors cannot decide what to do with it.

For one bio, see https://www.central-bank.org.tt/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/DECISIONS-AND-DESTINY-for-website_0.pdf

Drive around the island, and you'll find no end of old wooden houses.

Another.

Wood was used for government buildings, too, at least in smaller places.

Here, on the Chaguanas Main Road, is the falling-apart office of what was the public-health officer. Something new is coming, as glass-fronted Unique Furniture hints.

Before we look at new buildings, here are some old-timers in San Fernando. The Happy Corner Hotel and bar has been in operation near the San Fernando docks (and, when it arrived, the railway station) since the 1870s. Did the hotel always have that name? Dunno, but seems unlikely. (There was a Hotel Splendid, formerly the Grand Hotel, at 23 High Street, but it was a couple of blocks away.) The building looming in the background is part of the Southern Medical Center.

San Fernando's W.M. Tennant Building abutted the railway yard.

San Fernando's High Street in the 1880s, with San Fernando Hill in the background.

Angelo Bissessarsingh, A Walk Back in Time, 2015, p. 89.

Same location, 2026.

The most impressive nearby building: a Carnegie Library built during World War I.

One of the biggest jolts to the island's economy, along with oil and gas, was the arrival of the U.S. Army during World War II. Here's the entrance to Fort Read, which housed Waller Field, busy with planes heading to North Africa. The multi-lane highway was another American gift.

Waller Field is now, in part, the Waller Field International Raceway.

More concrete, this time part of Carlsen Field.

Another bit, this time busy with a junkyard.

The glory days, when Carlsen Field had a hangar protecting blimps looking for German submarines.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=6135544826458485&set=pcb.10160517954894269

Trinidad's housing sector today relies not on wood but on red blocks, also called clay blocks, here stacked at Bhagwansingh's Superstore near Piarco Airport.

Blocks at work.

A concrete boom-pump blocks a street in Felicity.

Need trim?

Corinthian capitals on marble columns.

The basic ingredient.

You can take an old house (like this one in the village of Iere, pronounced eye-ree) and renovate it.

The work isn't finished, but the owner has begun with a new addition.

Or you can start from scratch.

Another example.

And another.

Lots more.

Down market, but still with decorative concrete columns.

A complementary strategy: entirely new communities designed by the government's Housing Development Corporation, formerly the National Housing Authority.

A typical house.

Same plan, different colors.

Street scene.

A lot of the variation in this neighborhood comes from fencing.

Not cheap.

Another idea.

Time to look at the transformation of commercial streets. Here's a bit of Main Road, Chaguanas.

Overhaul in progress.

Same street, partly fixed up.

A new grocery opens in Felicity, 2026.

Part of Price Plaza, a shopping center on the east side of Chaguanas.

PriceSmart, a member's-only warehouse store in Price Plaza.

More on the way, here a mile north of Piarco Airport.

What do we find in the grocery stores? The irony of imported sugar.

And imported rice.

Local vegetables.

About half of the population of Trinidad (500,000 of the total population of about a million) is descended from the145,000 indentured workers who arrived from India between 1845 and 1917. Have the Indians changed a lot in that time? Yes and no. Tastes are stubborn: witness this poster in the window of Church's Texas Chicken.

Because cremation was illegal until 1936, Trinidad has Hindu cemeteries.

They are an uncomfortable subject.

People were buried here because they had to be, whatever the feelings of the families.

Today, at the north end of Felicity, cremation is once again practiced.

Here, too, at the Waterloo Cremation Site.

Temples were prohibited in the early days but were built by the 1870s and probably a bit earlier. Here's a photograph of one of the oldest surviving Hindu Temples, the Moose Bhagat Temple. The pyramid shrine was added at an unknown but later date.

Murli J. Kirpalani, et al, editors, Indian Centenary review: One Hundred years of Progress, 1845-1945, Trinidad, B.W.I., 1945, p. 65.