“They don’t have to worry about the next meal because their trust fund is good, and them spend their time surfing,” the Prime Minister of the tiny southern Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago said in June about a group of surfers fighting to protect a precious right point break on the island of Tobago. “And if the hotel is built at Rocky Point it would affect the waves in the sea, so they wouldn’t enjoy the surfing, and they go and smoke marijuana there and ‘meditate to your God’” he continued.
The surfing that is said to be affected is a warm water right point that breaks over a pristine reef, home to the biggest turtle nesting site in the country and surrounded by rainforest. On the waters edges are indigenous burial sites and the ruins of a Latvian fort that has stood since eastern Europeans colonized the island in the 1600s. The proposed hotel development is seeking to tear it all down and replace it with a large luxury Marriott.
Trinidad and Tobago is made up of two islands - Trinidad and Tobago. Tobago is the smaller of the pair, with a surface area of just 300km2 and sits just north of the coast of Venezuela. Rocky Point is a wedge of land that juts out into the shimmering blue Caribbean Sea on the west coast and is hugged by a reef called Mt. Irvine. This coral structure is home to a large food source on the island, a fishing spot that local fishermen depend on to survive. When winter swells pulse down from the North Atlantic the reef shudders into life - a right hander appears from the depths and reels off down the bay. Surfers fly in by the dozens from other islands in the Caribbean and a cluster of die hard Brits rush to board flights from Cornwall and touch down in warmer waters.
The headland is dense with deep green rainforest, home to a menagerie of birds and other native species. Amongst them are the remnants of a history that might well be long forgotten without these cultural artifacts to remind us that it occurred. Amerindians are the first people of Trinidad and Tobago who are found to have inhabited the area since 8000 B.C. and Carib speaking Kalin are thought to have been in Tobago from around 3500 B.C. European colonization of the islands decimated what was originally recorded in the 1500s as a population of 200,000 First Peoples down to 40,000 within a century.
The little known colonial history of the islands is that of Courland and Semigallia, which is located in present day Latvia. In the mid 1600s they traveled west to the Caribbean with a few hundred settlers and took aim at Tobago. But, despite multiple attempts, they were thwarted by Spain and turned their attention elsewhere. But they left behind marks of this past, the ruins of a fort that was once gilded by cannons pointed seaward toward incoming Spanish fleets, now stands abandoned on the shore.
In the subsequent colonial history that shifted back and forth between the powers of France and England cities and roads were built on the ruins and records of indigenous communities. Here at Rocky Point, the landscape tells this story in a single jog down to the beach with a surfboard in hand. Burial sites of Indigenous peoples sit alongside the fallen walls of Courland and Semigallia’s failed attempts at glory. The narrow thread of a track that winds through the forest that surfers traverse on their way to the water is a passage through time of this tiny island.
Since the 1970s there have been threats of this land being developed, but as politics have ebbed and flowed, the community has managed to push back and keep the developers at bay. But in the middle of COVID, as the world learned just how precarious a reliance on tourism dollars was, the site was put out for tender. A group of surfers quickly came together to create a foundation called Rocky Point Foundation and submit a proposal for a museum at the site and a walking tour through the history. But, the tender was granted to a local developer who would build a mammoth hotel with the Marriott brand attached. Local surfer and founder of Save Rocky Point foundation Duane Kenny responded to this proposal: “It was unreal, it had break waters and it had just massive concrete structures everywhere.” he said.
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The hotel plan now shows a plan for destruction of the rainforest, the construction of villas down to the water's edge and breakwalls to protect them from the massive swells that hammer the beachfront. The surfers fear a loss of access to the path down to the wave and the creation of backwash that will bounce off the new concrete structures that will face the water. The runoff from the construction site is expected to flow down on the reef, bringing with it pollutants that the reef has never been touched by before. Once the construction is complete, the ongoing outputs of a massive operational hotel are expected to drain down onto the reef and squeeze out its life.
The fishermen are worried about the impacts on their fish stocks and the surrounding community are worried about water security. And the thing that has bewildered local surf school operator Alvin Luke is that the island doesn’t seem to need it: “There are just so many of them,” he says, “and then what happens is the government just takes them over. There is the Manta Lodge which is under government control right now and there is a hotel not too far away from our beach that is privately owned but its current state is abandoned.”
Duane Kenny echoes this sentiment, questioning the rationale about the development bringing jobs to the island, “I’ve been in the hotel business most of my life, I can tell you that not one large hotel is fully staffed. They're all understaffed because we don't have enough workers to work here and the locals don't necessarily want tourism jobs.” he explains.
“[Large hotels] haven't done well for years and the small hotels tend to do much better because they're more serviced, more nature focused. We have a few small hotels that are really successful, they do well on the 50 rooms and the big hotels are all struggling.” he says.
Surf tourism, when developed sustainably, has the potential to spring up whole new, long term thriving economies in communities located around quality waves. We have seen from examples like Bali, where a similar battle is currently playing out on the cliffs of Uluwatu, what unchecked expansion can do to a place. But a sustainable surf tourism model has been developed in countries like Papua New Guinea which prioritises environmental protection and profit sharing for communities who reside at surf spots over the destruction of what it is that makes a place so unique. Cutting edge tourism research also shows that people are seeking cultural experiences and ecological values more and more over the opulence of grand global hotel chains.
Surfers who travel to the Rocky Point area often spend three or four weeks at a time waiting for swell to arrive, spending more per stay than than the occasional short stay visitors who might check into a room at the Marriott. When a swell hits Rocky Point, whether it’s from a trust fund or otherwise, money pours into the small time vendors and homestay hosts who reside behind the bay from surfers who fly in and hang around. So, maybe it’s just the weed talking, but perhaps this buying power could be considered and every effort made to protect and celebrate this precious place.
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