Walking the trail to the river from the village of Grande Riviere takes about 40 minutes if you know where you’re going. Tutankhamun does. Our local guide is tall and lanky, moving through the rainforest of Trinidad’s Northern Range the way water moves downhill, gliding between boulders, skipping over slick rocks, and curving around roots and trees, never breaking stride. When we reached the swimming hole, the water was cold and clear, and the falls were gentle enough to stand under. By the time we made it back to the riverbank after a much-needed cool-off, someone had started a bonfire.
This is a lime, Trinidadian for “a gathering that comes together over food, cold drinks, and good vibes.” This one was designed around grilled fish, Carib beers, the gentle river beside us, and the forest canopy loud overhead with the calls of hundreds of tropical birds. This experience is not on any itinerary. It is not a tourism product. It is just what people do here, and on this particular afternoon in late January, I happened to be included.
Trinidad reported 373,027 air and sea arrivals in 2025, an 11 percent jump from the year before. Carnival alone drew an estimated 52,000 visitors this past February.
The numbers are modest by regional standards (by comparison, Jamaica welcomed 3.7 million arrivals in 2025), but Trinidad’s visitor arrivals are accelerating, and the small country still has the chance to decide what happens next. Most Caribbean islands never got that choice; tourism became an economic necessity before anyone thought to ask exactly what kind of tourism they wanted or needed.
But Trinidad’s oil revenues bought it something rarer than a beautiful coastline: time.
A travel advisory puts growth on pause
In April 2026, the U.S. State Department elevated Trinidad and Tobago to a Level 3 advisory, or “Reconsider Travel,” due to a spike in crime, which is one step below its highest warning. For many American visitors, that designation symbolizes a door closing on travel to the destination.
Brandon Blache-Cohen, CEO of AllPeopleBeHappy—a nonprofit that organizes community-based volunteer and learning trips and funds local development projects in more than 20 countries, and has worked with Trinidadian communities for 14 years—recently watched a university scrap a planned student program in Trinidad after the advisory made it impossible to get the trip approved.
“The algorithm has done a great disservice to these types of valuable cross-border engagements,” he says. He’s skeptical of how advisories translate once they hit the news cycle, amplified by algorithms built to reward fear over nuance. “It makes the world seem scarier than it is,” he says.
The advisory follows a “State of Emergency” declared in 2025, which was most recently expanded this June based on criminal activity. The advisory will likely cost Trinidad its visitors in the near term. But it may also buy the island more time to craft the right tourism plan before scale makes the question moot.
A case study in ecotourism
Trinidad, part of the dual-island Caribbean nation Trinidad and Tobago off the coast of Venezuela, was once connected to Venezuela by a now-submerged land bridge. Its mountain chain is a fractured part of the Andes; its rainforests shelter South American wildlife found nowhere else in the island chain. It is the birthplace of soca music and the engine of Carnival culture. Its cuisine is a fusion of Indian, African, and Creole traditions.
Nothing here was built around visitors, and that is precisely what’s at stake as interest grows.
On the island’s northeast coast, Grande Riviere offers the clearest picture of what intentional tourism can look like when a community controls it. Between March and August, up to 300 leatherback sea turtles nest on its half-mile beach in a single night, making it one of the highest-density leatherback nesting sites in the world. In 1989, Len Peters, a Grande Riviere native, began patrolling that beach at night with a small group of neighbors to challenge and discourage community members who hunted turtles for meat and collected their eggs.
Grande Riviere is one of the highest-density leatherback turtle nesting sites in the world.
Photo by Gaylon Wampler/Shutterstock
“Things could get hostile and at times even dangerous,” he says. “We were trying to introduce this completely new idea of managing a natural resource.”
For the first decade, the work was essentially policing. Then the approach changed.
“Instead of fighting people, we started trying to transform how the community thought about turtles. Over time, villagers became guardians of the sea turtles instead of their biggest threat.”
Thirty-seven years later, the Grande Riviere Nature Tour Guide Association, which Peters now chairs, comprises 40 members, all from the village. When Hadco Experiences, a Trinidad-based ecotourism company founded by John Hadad—whose family has made the journey to this beach for five decades from their home in Port of Spain—acquired Mt. Plaisir Estate Hotel, the beachfront property around which tourism orbits in Grande Riviere, the model expanded. Hadco eliminated single-use plastics at the properties, replaced white street lighting with red to protect nesting turtles, and doubled guide fees, directing every dollar to the association. Today its operations support more than 50 community livelihoods.
“After 37 years in conservation,” Peters says, “I never imagined a commercial property and business team could become as passionate about turtle conservation as my own team.”
The model is already reaching inland. Hadco also operates Asa Wright Nature Centre, a renowned birding lodge set in a former cocoa and coffee estate in the rainforested hills above Port of Spain, where the same low-impact philosophy now serves birders and naturalists rather than beachgoers and turtle-watchers.
But the beach at Grande Riviere and Asa Wright Nature Centre are two small examples. The harder questions are whether what works there can hold as Trinidad’s profile rises and whether it can travel beyond a single extraordinary village to the rest of the island. Hadad sees the limits clearly. He says his model for what Trinidad should become is Botswana: low-impact, higher-yield tourism that doesn’t overwhelm what travelers come to see.
“We do not want to see thousands of people on that beach in one night,” he says.
Engendering that vision requires a conversation between private operators, government, and communities that, he admits, isn’t happening with enough urgency.
“There is not enough consideration around it, and not enough conversation,” he said.
The 11 percent growth in tourism suggests the conversation can’t wait much longer.
Blache-Cohen, who has watched tourism reshape communities in more than 20 countries across North and South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, puts the central tension plainly: In destinations where tourism became an economic lifeline, the balance of power shifted dramatically and permanently.
“It changes the conversation around who is in charge. The visitor or the host?” he says.
Where does Trinidad go from here?
Trinidad’s oil economy has so far kept that question open. And Trinidad isn’t alone in facing that question. Neighboring Guyana, also sitting on oil wealth and largely untouched by mass tourism, is approaching its own version of this moment. But oil production in Trinidad has fallen by more than 80 percent since the 1970s, and some estimates give the country a decade of gas reserves at current rates. Buffers like that erode. Travel advisories lift. Instagram finds everywhere eventually.
The culture that grew without tourists is still, for now, growing for itself. Akua Leith is managing director of MITTCO (Musical Instruments of Trinidad and Tobago Company Limited), which handcrafts steel pans in Port of Spain. The steel pan is one of the only instruments invented in the 20th century, born here in Trinidad. Leith watches the growing outside interest in Carnival and soca with cautious optimism. None of it was built for an outside audience, he notes, and that’s what makes it worth experiencing.
“Growth is welcome,” he says, “but it must happen in a way where we remain the authors of the experience, not just the hosts of it.”
Peters, now in his fourth decade of nightly patrols, has a 50-year vision for Grande Riviere: community still in control, environment intact, tourism existing in balance with nature rather than overwhelming it. What keeps him up isn’t climate change or overdevelopment. It’s something more subtle and harder to legislate against.
“We’ve done this work so well, for so long, that there’s a risk people begin to take it for granted,” he says. “If we don’t keep the fire burning, the flame could eventually be lost.”
For now, those willing to travel to Trinidad will still be able to find conservation-focused, locally owned properties on the beach or deep in the rainforest, run by the people who have spent decades protecting both. Direct flights connect Trinidad to New York, Miami, Houston, Fort Lauderdale, and Orlando via Caribbean Airlines, JetBlue, American Airlines, and United Airlines. Operators like Hadco Experiences can arrange itineraries that move between the coast and the rainforest interior, and everywhere in between. The infrastructure is thin by design, not by accident, and that scarcity is what makes the experience unique.
Trinidad has the fire. What it needs now is the will, and the policy and the conversation, to tend it before the crowd decides the country’s direction for it.
