Where is DOMINICA located on the map?
Dominica is a country and an island of the Caribbean archipelago, located between the French islands of Saintes and Marie-Galante (two outbuildings of Guadeloupe) in the north, and Martinique in the south. His pre-Columbian name is Wai’tu kubuli which means “His body is great”.
Dominica is an island of 754 km2 located in the Caribbean Sea, north of Martinique and south of the islands of Saintes and Marie-Galante, two of the French West Indies dependent on Guadeloupe. The island is 47 km long and 29 km wide.
The island enjoys a tropical climate, sometimes softened by northeasterly winds and heavy rainfall. The interior of the island consists of mountains of volcanic origin. This volcanism is still slightly active, as evidenced by the presence of a boiling lake and the presence of a “valley of desolation” Dominican. This boiling lake (the second in the world by its size) is at the bottom of a crater and is fed by a waterfall, the boiling being caused by the heat of an underground magma chamber.
The “valley of desolation” is a valley of volcanic origin very sulphurous, fed by hot springs that prevent the development of all plant life, thus contrasting with the surrounding tropical forests.
In general, Dominica has one of the most mountainous configurations in the West Indies. These reliefs are covered with a large tropical forest, almost untapped. The land is irrigated by numerous rivers descending from the reliefs and forming an extensive network of rivers and natural pools, with many waterfalls. This nature is the refuge of many rare species. Hot springs, bubbling lakes and furious torrents brightened the tropical forest of the island. This is called Waltikubuli (Great is his body) in the language of the indigenous people, the Kalinagos.
The lowest point of the country is at sea level (0 m), and the highest is the summit Morne Diablotins which rises to 1 447 meters above sea level.
On the west coast of the island, the village of Pointe-Michel alone evokes the character of Dominica: a superb haven but cramped in an environment of high mountains and cliffs. Its rough morphology has, from the beginning, rebuffed the colonizers. Covered with a virtually impenetrable plant cover, Dominica is home to 76,000 inhabitants, including two thousand descendants of Caribbean Indians living on a reserve granted by Queen Victoria in 1883 and in principle prohibited to foreigners.
To the south-west of the island, on the coast, are the remains of a great underwater caldera whose eastern part forms the peninsula of Scott.
Dominica wanted to develop an ecotourism program, rewarded by the Green Globe 21 certification validating the ecotourism quality of this destination, for the first time attributed to a Caribbean island. Dominica wants to go further with, since 2007, a ten-year program to transform the island into a “biological island” through the combination of ecotourism, agrotourism and health tourism, with the conversion from agriculture to organic production, an ethical and equitable trade that does not require excessive consumption of natural resources.
Leave a reply