The Baths are a stretch of shore on Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands, where granite boulders taller than the palms lie stacked and leaning against one another. Granite has no business on this coast, where nearly everything is coral or volcanic rock. These blocks cooled from magma far underground, and they were rounded down there too: groundwater ate at their edges and corners fastest and peeled curved shells off each one, like the layers of an onion. By the time the softer rock above them wore away and daylight finally reached them, they were already the smooth domes you climb through today. Resting against each other, they have left a maze of dim passages, arches and flooded grottoes underneath.
Getting through that maze is the visit. The trail from the entrance stops being a path partway down: you go up wooden ladders bolted to the rock, pull yourself along fixed ropes, and wade knee-deep through seawater under boulders that shut out the sky. The granite stays slick the whole way. In the Cathedral Room, a low chamber roofed by stone, daylight drops through the gaps overhead and skips off the water onto the walls. The air turns cool, and the noise of the beach falls away behind you. Between the blocks the sea collects into shallow, glass-clear pools that stay calm while the open water works away outside, warm enough to lie in — which is where the name is usually said to come from. These boulders were once among the finest beach-bouldering grounds anywhere, with routes rising straight off soft sand; climbing them is closed now, and scrambling, wading and swimming are what is left. The maze lets you out at Devil's Bay, a cove of white sand walled in by the same rock, where the granite drops straight into the sea and reef fish gather in its shadow among the sea fans. The only way back out is the way you came in.