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.

Soufrière Hills is the volcano that buried Plymouth, the capital of Montserrat, when it woke in 1995. The ash set so deep over the town that you now walk into it at what used to be roof height. The southern half of the island has been a sealed exclusion zone ever since. With a permit, a certified guide and a radio line open to the observatory, you get about an hour inside the buried capital, and you tread on hardened ash past shopfronts filled to their ceilings and a church tower standing in grey mud. Not everything down there is buried. On the slopes above the old town whole neighbourhoods stand where they were left, roofs gone and walls open, the bush climbing back through the windows. They were emptied in 1995 and 1996 and never reoccupied. Jack Boy Hill, on the edge of the zone, is a platform with a mounted telescope looking straight down the 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 there is the strangest part. The summit is permanently off limits on foot, so the only way to see into the dome is from a small plane. The scoured flanks, the gullies cut by pyroclastic flows and the pale gas seeping out of the rock resolve into one working machine. Twenty minutes north you are on an ordinary Caribbean island again: rainforest in the Centre Hills, black-sand bays, and four thousand people at work. Montserrat's other famous ruin is up there too, and the volcano had no part in it. George Martin built AIR Studios here in 1979, and more than seventy albums were recorded there in ten years. Hurricane Hugo flattened it in 1989, six years before the mountain stirred, and the buildings still stand roofless in the greenery. The volcano's last act was to make more island. In February 2010 a piece of the dome gave way and the flows ran a kilometre out to sea, cooling into about a square kilometre of new coast.

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