The Animal Flower Cave is a sea cave at North Point, the northern tip of Barbados in the parish of Saint Lucy, the only cave on the island that is walked into, ground out of the coral rock by the Atlantic surf with windows punched through its far wall onto the open sea, and it is entered down steps cut through a hole in its roof in 1912. The cave lies under the most exposed corner of the island, undercut coral cliffs with no shelter and the swell arriving from Africa with nothing in its way, and its floor is coral roughly 400,000 to 500,000 years old, lifted out of the sea as the island rose, with the ceiling younger still; the opening in the roof was not an entrance nature made for people but a blowhole, through which the sea once spouted, and the coral steps lead down through it to a dim floor and across to the seaward wall, where the sea has broken clean through in openings framing the blue water and the waves coming in. The animal flowers are two species of sea anemone in the shallow rock pools, some red and some the big yellow ones the locals call sea marigolds, which shut their tentacles at a shadow, and a careless hand empties a pool in seconds.
When the sea is calm the pools inside the cave are swum in, natural baths of clear water with the surf beyond the windows, and in the heavy ground swells from December to February the inner chamber shuts and the roof opening turns back into a blowhole. The cliffs above look straight out over deep Atlantic water, and from mid-February into April humpback whales pass through on migration, watched from the clifftop terrace and the restaurant there, one of the few places in Barbados to see them from land. The cliff edge at North Point is walked for the wind and the surf against the undercut rock. The Animal Flower Cave is a room the sea made in the coral, and the flowers in its pools are alive.