Carbet Falls draws around 400,000 people a year, and not one of them can walk to the foot of a waterfall. Three cascades drop off the eastern flank of La Soufrière, the active volcano at the heart of Basse-Terre: the first falls 115 metres in two stages, the second 110 metres down a sheer, mineral-streaked cliff, and the third only 20 metres. The Carbet river gathers them, rising two kilometres upstream on slopes that take several metres of rain a year, inside the core protected forest of Guadeloupe National Park. In November 2004 the Les Saintes earthquake shook hundreds of cubic metres of rock off the second fall's cliff, and the heavy rains that followed finished the work. Municipal orders closed the last stretch of each approach. Today you stand on platforms and look.
The walk to the second fall is the one almost everyone makes: about 1.4 kilometres there and back through dripping forest, over wooden bridges, past tree ferns and the red bracts of balisier, on a path smooth enough that the first viewpoint is reachable by wheelchair. From the promontory the fall hangs across the ravine in a single white veil. The other two ask more — a hard three-hour round trip for the first, a separate trail from the Routhiers district for the third. If you came to get into the water, the swim is somewhere else: a signposted path off the access road drops fifteen minutes to Bassin Paradise, a pool four metres deep on the Grosse Corde river, fed by two slender cascades and lit green over pale stones. Go a little downstream and the same water runs warm. Rain arrives here without warning in any month, and the falls run hardest in the hour after it clears.