Animal Flower Cave

Wind first. It hits you the moment you step from the car, salted and steady, coming off thousands of miles of open ocean. You are standing at North Point, the very top of Barbados. Below your feet, hidden in the cliff, the sea has carved out a cave.

This is the island's northernmost tip. Look out from the cliff edge and there is nothing but Atlantic, running unbroken to the horizon. The waves here are not the gentle ones of the west coast beaches. They arrive tall and heavy, and they explode against the rock in columns of white spray.

Getting here is part of the pleasure. The parish of St. Lucy, at the island's northern end, is quiet country. The road passes cane fields, small villages, and churches, and traffic thins with every mile. Most visitors come by hire car or taxi, and the last stretch ends at a simple car park by the cliff.

Barbados is a coral island. Its rock was built by living reefs, lifted slowly out of the sea over hundreds of thousands of years. Coral stone is soft, and the ocean works on it without rest. Wave by wave, the sea hollowed a chamber into the base of these cliffs. That chamber is the Animal Flower Cave.

The name comes from small sea creatures. In the cave's shallow pools live sea anemones. Local people called them animal flowers, because they open like soft blossoms, and then, if a shadow or a fingertip comes near, they fold shut in an instant. The flowers, it turns out, can feel.

People have been coming to see this for a long time. Written accounts of the cave go back to 1780. For more than a century, visitors scrambled down the rocks as best they could. Then, in 1912, workers cut a stairway into the coral stone, and the descent became part of the experience.

You go down with a guide. The steps are steep and worn, and the air changes as you descend. The wind falls away. The temperature drops. The sound of the sea turns from a roar into something deeper, a slow boom that you feel in your chest as much as hear. The cave floor lies only a little above the sea, about six feet at calm water. That nearness is the whole drama of the place. Every large wave sends a shudder through the rock and a sheet of spray through the openings. The ocean is not a view here. It is a presence, close enough to touch.

Inside, the cave opens into wide chambers. Openings in the rock face the ocean, like rough windows. Through them, the Atlantic appears in framed pieces: a rectangle of blue, a burst of spray, a passing bird. When the sun is right, light bounces off the water and ripples across the ceiling of the cave.

Look closely at the walls. They are not gray. Minerals in the stone, iron and copper among them, stain the rock with washes of green, brown, and soft purple. The colors shift as the light moves. Guides like to point out shapes in the rock as well. Bring some imagination.

In the largest chamber waits the cave's best surprise: a natural pool of clear seawater, deep enough to swim in. On calm days, visitors slip into the still water and float there, looking out through a rock window at the open ocean pounding just beyond. Few swims anywhere feel quite like it.

The sea decides whether the cave opens at all. When swells run high, waves push through the windows and flood the chambers, and the stairway closes for safety. It is worth checking conditions before you make the drive north. The same power that built this place still runs it.

Back on top, stay a while. A restaurant and bar sit on the cliff edge, and the view from the tables is all ocean. In the early months of the year, humpback whales pass this coast, and people spot them from here, blowing and breaching far below. The clifftop itself rewards a slow walk. Low sea grapes and grasses bend in the wind, and the edge drops away in layers of pale stone. Take care near the rim and watch children closely. The viewpoints are unfenced in places, and the wind at the top can be strong.

Before you leave, take one last look down the coast. The cliffs run away to the east, wave-cut and patient, and somewhere beneath them the sea is already carving the next cave. The anemones open and close in their pools, as they did long before anyone gave them a name.