The Carbet Falls are three cascades on the Carbet river off the flank of La Soufrière, the active volcano of Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean, the tallest 115 metres, and they are seen from platforms in the rainforest, since rockfalls closed the last stretch to the foot of the second fall in 2004 and a landslide has kept the trail to the first one shut. The falls are the most visited natural site in the island, in a national park of tree ferns and the red bracts of balisier, and the path to the second fall, 110 metres high, runs near-level for 1.4 kilometres there and back over wooden footbridges and stone steps to a promontory facing it, with the forest falling away in an unbroken green sweep to the Atlantic and the island of Marie-Galante on the horizon; the first fall, higher up the mountain, is the tallest at 115 metres, and the third, 20 metres, is reached by a separate path from the Routhiers district to a platform above it, the shortest drop but the one that moves the most water. Columbus named the island for a Spanish monastery in 1493, and the Kalinago who lived here called it Karukera, the island of beautiful waters.
Below the access road a sign points down steep steps, about fifteen minutes, to Bassin Paradise, a pool fed by a pair of thin cascades and glowing green over pale stones, transparent to its four-metre floor in the dry season and the swim of the visit; walking downstream from it, the river turns warm to the touch where the volcano's hot springs enter it, and the sulphur baths of the coast below are the same water. October is the wettest month, when the river swells and the three falls run as a grey-white curtain, but the same rain triggers the landslides that close the trails, and March is the driest, with the steps down to the pool at their least slick. The Carbet Falls are a volcano's water in three leaps, and the platforms are where the mountain lets people stand.