Nevis Peak is a volcano of 985 metres that is most of the island of Nevis, in the eastern Caribbean, and it wears a cap of cloud almost every day. That cloud named the country. Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, Our Lady of the Snows, wore down into Nevis — an island named for snow that was never there. Nothing has erupted in recorded history, but the mountain is far from cold. In 1953, after two years of severe earthquake swarms, a patch of ground at Cades Bay began to steam, and it has vented ever since. At Bath, below the eastern slope, water leaves the mountain at around 42°C, hot enough to redden your skin within minutes. The old Bath Hotel beside it, built in 1778 and generally called the first in the Caribbean, burned in 2022; the bath house reopened in 2023.
Nevisians still turn up there in the early evening with a towel and no ceremony at all. What the climb up the cone asks of you is different: four or five hours of mud, roots and fixed ropes, with the top third hauled up on your arms rather than walked. The summit turns out to be a small grassy clearing, and St Kitts appears across the channel only when the cloud parts. Most of the island's life is on the lower slopes. Pinney's Beach runs for miles of soft sand and sea grapes along the west coast, with long stretches holding nothing but your footprints, and inland the peak fills the sky behind the palms as it does from almost everywhere on Nevis. The botanical gardens at its foot keep lily ponds and a conservatory that recreates the cloud forest growing higher on the same mountain. From June to October hawksbill, green and leatherback turtles come ashore to nest on the dark sand below. The green vervets that raid those gardens are not native at all: colonists brought them from West Africa as pets in the 1600s and they never left. Counts put them at ten to fifteen thousand against about eleven thousand residents, which would make monkeys the island's majority.