Soufrière Hills Volcano

PeaksPlymouth Exclusion Zone,Montserrat

The volcano that buried Montserrat's capital in 1995, leaving Plymouth under twelve metres of ash inside a sealed exclusion zone half the island wide.

September·Quiet month

Jul–Dec

The wet, storm-prone half: the dome can sit inside cloud for days, while heavy rain sends grey lahars down the Belham Valley — the only route into Plymouth — cancelling tours at short notice. The green north stays lush; the buried city waits.

Year-round The steaming dome, the grey ash fans and the roofs of buried Plymouth stand here every day; only whether cloud lets you see them, and rain lets you reach them, changes with the season.

The Soufrière Hills Volcano is the mountain that buried Plymouth, the capital of the British island of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean, under twelve metres of ash and mud in the eruptions that began in 1995, and it stands inside an exclusion zone covering the southern half of the island, watched from lookouts on its edge, entered with a police permit for an hour in the buried town, and seen into only from the air. The volcano woke in July 1995 after centuries of quiet, and the pyroclastic flows of 1997 killed nineteen people and destroyed the capital and the airport, so that two-thirds of the population left the island; Plymouth was abandoned under the ash, its church, its clock tower and its hotels standing to the first floor in grey, and the dome has grown and collapsed since, in February 2010 sending flows a kilometre out to sea that added a square kilometre of new land to the island. From Jack Boy Hill a landscaped platform with a telescope looks straight down the eastern flank over the grey delta that swallowed the old airport at Trants, and the observatory on the western side, which monitors the dome, shows the story and the view. With a permit, a certified guide and a radio line to the observatory, visitors get roughly an hour inside the buried capital, walking the second storeys of a town at ground level, and above it the villages of the exclusion zone stand abandoned but not buried, houses with the furniture still in them. The dome stands clear only in the dry months, from January to April, and in the wet season it sits inside cloud for days. A few kilometres north Montserrat is a normal Caribbean island again, rainforest in the Centre Hills, black-sand bays and around 4,000 people; the island's other famous ruin is the recording studio where the Police and Dire Straits made records. Soufrière Hills is a volcano that took half an island, and the other half is watching it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Plymouth can be entered, but never on your own — a police permit and a certified guide in radio contact with the observatory are required, and tour operators arrange the paperwork.
Look at the dome early — the summit is clearest in the first hours after sunrise, and trade-wind cloud usually caps it by late morning, even in the driest months.
The two lookouts face different halves of the disaster — Jack Boy Hill looks over the buried old airport on the east coast, Garibaldi Hill down onto Plymouth.
The Belham Valley crossing is the weak link — it is the route into the exclusion zone, and mudflows or heavy rain can shut it and cancel tours at short notice.

Things to do

1
Watch the dome steam from Jack Boy Hill
A landscaped platform with a mounted telescope looks straight down the volcano's eastern flank, over the grey delta that swallowed the old airport at Trants. Steam drifts off the dome on most clear mornings, and the silence up here is the strangest part.
2
Walk into Plymouth on a police permit
With a permit, a certified guide and a radio line to the volcano observatory, you get roughly an hour inside the buried capital. You walk on hardened ash at what used to be roof height, past shopfronts filled to their ceilings and a church tower standing in grey mud.
3
See the crater itself from the air
The summit is permanently off limits on foot, so the only way to look into the dome is from above. From the air the scoured flanks, the gullies cut by pyroclastic flows and the pale gas still seeping from the rock resolve into one live, working machine.
4
Find the abandoned villages above Plymouth
Not everything in the exclusion zone is buried. On the slopes above the capital whole neighbourhoods simply stand there, roofs gone and walls open, with the bush climbing back through the windows — emptied in the evacuations of 1995 and 1996, and never reoccupied.
5
Cross into the green half of the island
A few kilometres north of the dead zone, Montserrat is a normal Caribbean island again: rainforest in the Centre Hills, black-sand bays, and around 4,000 people getting on with life. The contrast, crossed in twenty minutes, is the thing you remember.

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Nearby

64 km