Soufrière Hills woke in July 1995 after roughly 350 years of quiet and spent the next two years burying the town at its foot. Plymouth, Montserrat's port capital, was evacuated, then smothered by pyroclastic flows and mud until parts of it lay under some twelve metres of hardened grey deposit. It is still, on paper, the island's capital — the only ghost town in the world that holds the title. The flows destroyed the airport and killed nineteen people on 25 June 1997, and about two-thirds of Montserrat's people left for good. The volcano grew as it destroyed: lava heaping into a dome lifted the summit from 915 to roughly 1,050 metres, and the whole southern half of the island became a sealed exclusion zone.
No new lava has emerged since February 2010, and the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, which watches the mountain around the clock, now holds it at the lowest hazard level; steam still leaks from the dome. From the lookouts on Jack Boy Hill and Garibaldi Hill you see an island cut in half — rainforest and villages in the north, and to the south a grey fan of ash sloping into very blue water, with roofs and a church tower breaking the surface where streets once ran. With a police permit and a certified guide in radio contact with the observatory, you can spend an hour inside Plymouth itself, walking at what used to be rooftop height. The mountain has not finished with the island: every wet season, heavy rain strips loose ash off the upper slopes and sends grey mudflows down the Belham Valley, rewriting the ground below.