The Animal Flower Cave is the only sea cave on Barbados you can walk into, and the shaft you climb down through was never a door. It sits under North Point, the island's most exposed corner, where the Atlantic arrives with nothing in its way, and the sea ground the chamber out of coral rock over hundreds of thousands of years. Until 1912 the only approach was by boat. That year steps were cut down through a hole in the roof — a hole the sea had made for its own purposes, and still uses. From the bottom of them you cross a dim floor to the far wall, where the waves have broken clean through into openings that frame the open water. A few steps back from those gaps is the place to stand, so the chamber stays dark around you and the light reads against it. When the water on the floor settles, it hands you a second set of windows.
The cave is named for what lives in its pools. The animal flowers are two kinds of sea anemone, small red ones and the larger yellow sort islanders call the sea marigold, and they shut their tentacles at a touch, a vibration, even a shadow crossing the water. One careless hand leaves a pool looking empty. On calm days those same pools are cool baths a few steps from the Atlantic. Above them the clifftop looks straight out over deep water, and from February into April humpbacks pass through it on migration — the first sign is a small white puff of breath long before any body shows. The rock under all of it is on the move. The floor is coral half a million years old, the ceiling only a quarter of that, and the island keeps being pushed up as the Atlantic seafloor slides beneath it. That is how a room cut at sea level ended up dry enough to walk in. It is a loan, not a gift. When the swell is running, the shaft you came down throws the sea back out.