France in the tropics — Creole cooking, rum agricole, and a volcano that buried a city
Martinique is France in the Caribbean in the most literal sense — it's an overseas department of France, using the euro, with French schools and the best Creole cuisine in the Caribbean. The north is dominated by Mount Pelée, whose 1902 eruption killed 30,000 people and buried the city of Saint-Pierre entirely — the ruins can still be explored on foot and by diving. The south has the beaches and beach clubs; the north has the rum distilleries producing the only AOC-certified rum in the world (rhum agricole, made from fresh cane juice rather than molasses).
The 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée is one of the deadliest volcanic disasters in recorded history: Saint-Pierre — then the 'Paris of the Antilles' — was destroyed in minutes by a pyroclastic surge that killed ~29,000 people. The sole survivor in the city centre was a prisoner named Ludger Sylbaris, protected by his thick-walled underground cell; he later toured with Barnum & Bailey's circus as 'the man who lived through doomsday.' Martinique's intellectual identity was shaped by Aimé Césaire, who founded the Négritude literary movement in Paris in the 1930s.