Mount Pelée destroyed a city of 28,000 people in a matter of minutes. On the morning of 8 May 1902 a scorching avalanche of gas, ash and rock — a nuée ardente — poured off the volcano at up to 200 km/h, and Saint-Pierre, then the busiest port in the French Caribbean, ceased to exist. Only three people in the town are known to have lived, among them a prisoner named Ludger Sylbaris, shielded by the thick stone walls of his cell. It remains the deadliest eruption of the twentieth century, and it gave volcanology a word: eruptions that behave this way are still called Peléean. In the months that followed, a plug of lava too stiff to flow was pushed whole out of the crater like a stone finger, before crumbling away in the spring of 1903; a later eruption, from 1929 to 1932, built the dome that forms the summit you climb today.
The mountain stands 1,397 metres above the sea and makes its own weather. Trails climb from Morne-Rouge past the Aileron ridge and the Plateau des Palmistes, or up the drier, leeward Grande Savane route from the Saint-Pierre side, through dripping cloud forest and loose volcanic scree to the rim of the Étang Sec caldera — where, if the cloud holds off, the Atlantic and the Caribbean lie on either side of you at once. Below, Saint-Pierre has grown back into a quiet fishing town on black sand, the shell of its theatre and Sylbaris's cell still standing, and the ships that burned at anchor still lying on the floor of the bay. Humpbacks come into that same bay to calve each winter. Pelée is not finished: it has been restless since 2019, and Martinique's volcano observatory has kept it under yellow vigilance since December 2020. UNESCO listed the mountain and its forests in 2023.