Tobago Cays sit inside their reef rather than behind an island. Horseshoe Reef, a four-kilometre arc of coral, takes the open Atlantic swell head-on, and five uninhabited islets lie in the flat water it leaves behind — Petit Rameau, Petit Bateau, Baradal and Jamesby within the arc, and Petit Tabac alone outside it to the east. The cays are high points on a shallow volcanic bank, and the lagoon between them is 1,400 acres of white sand; sunlight bounces straight off that pale floor, which is why the water reads as lit turquoise rather than deep blue. No one lives on any of them. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines made the whole area a marine park in December 1997, and the seagrass meadows rooted in the sand are the reason turtles define the place: green turtles graze the beds, and hawksbill and green turtles haul out to nest on the beaches.
You can only arrive by boat, and the water off Baradal stays shallow a long way out. Snorkel the turtle-watching zone on its south-western shore and green turtles feed below you with their heads buried in the grass, rising for air an arm's length away. Beyond the beach the reef line breaks white while the lagoon stays glassy, iguanas rustle through the scrub, and charter boats swing on their moorings. Then came 2024. Record ocean heat bleached corals across the Caribbean, and on 1 July Hurricane Beryl crossed the southern Grenadines as a Category 4 storm, its waves snapping reef structure and stripping the palms off the cays. The park has since reopened; the sand, the turtles and the colour are as they were, but the coral is thinner, and the park is now replanting it.