Where Spices and Nature are Key to Healthy Living
Diana Ballon embraces the moment, as she immerses herself in pure Grenada Wellness with gratitude for all the healthy living this island shares with her through its nature, spices, culture and people.
Grenada Wellness
Finding Gratitude in Embracing the Moment
The theme is gratitude. We are sitting cross legged, staring out at the water in the distance, and listening to a yoga music playlist called, “Embrace the Moment.” The open-air yoga studio where we are practising has pink bougainvillea and white moringa flowers in the foreground, and a stone buddha sits next to me on the treetop platform like a benevolent companion.
When yoga instructor Marcia Cameron asks us to bring gratitude to the self, and then to the people around us, I find my mind easily sliding into the exercise. Mindfulness and compassion aren’t difficult to conjure up here in Grenada, where every aspect of life could easily fit under the rubric of wellness.
While this yoga practice was at True Blue Bay Boutique Resort, I felt a similar state of well-being throughout my stay in Grenada. With fresh fruit, seafood and spices, “lush landscapes,” beautiful beaches and waterfalls, this island is the perfect setting for a wellness escape.
I got to discover all this shortly after West Jet had initiated new non-stop flights from Toronto to Grenada, a small Windward Island about 34 kilometres long and 19 kilometres wide that lies just north of Venezuela and south of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean Sea.
Over a week on the island country of Grenada, staying at three different resorts, I enjoyed a healthy diet, with an abundance of seafood, fresh fruit and vegetables, learnt and experienced the benefits of the island’s many spices and delicious artisanal chocolate and spent valuable time in nature.
Grenada, the Spice Island
Although I had known about Grenada’s designation as the “spice island,” I didn’t know until I visited quite how prevalent spices on the island are. Grenada is the number two producer of nutmeg in the world (beat out only by Indonesia), and also grows copious amounts of cacao (the raw, less processed form of cocoa), cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, mace, bay leaves and cloves. Many of these spices are used in the food and drink, from nutmeg and cinnamon incorporated into stews and soups; to baked goods like gingerbread; turmeric in meats, rice dishes and seafood; and cocoa tea.
At Grenada’s new Six Senses La Sagesse resort, a brand known for its focus on wellness, spices are integral to visitors’ stay. This focus starts from the time you get La Sagesse, when — as part of an arrival ritual — you are invited to smell six spices and choose two (I picked butterfly pea and bay leaf), which you are then given in a cloth pouch to make your own bush tea— while being asked to consider an intention for your stay.
Later in the week, we visit the Tower Estate, where we tour their Great House, organic farm and two-acre garden with everything from tropical trees to spice plants like the bay leaf tree. We also try their delicious blue tea, one of many teas they provide as part of a “tea experience.”
Other times, spices show up in less expected ways, like on people’s bodies! When we are at the all-inclusive Royalton Grenada Resort, for example, their sales executive Kareem Smith pulls up his sleeve to show us his tattoo of a nutmeg seed on his upper arm!
Cultivating Cacao Culture on Grenada
Grenada has been also cultivating cacao for centuries, because of the island’s rich volcanic soil, and its ability to thrive in a narrow band around the equator, roughly 20 degrees north and south. Grenada boasts eight chocolate makers and has an annual chocolate festival that is going on its 12th year in May 2025.
Over a “wellness day” organised at True Blue, the hotel’s owner Magdalena Fielden, who also owns the House of Chocolate in town, taught us about the history of chocolate and cacao. We learnt how cacao originated in the Amazon Rainforest some 4,000 years ago, and how chocolate production began in Grenada with the founding of the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1998, thanks to Mott Green, Edmond Brown and Doug Browne, “the Willy Wonkas of Grenada ” and pioneers of the bean to bar movement.
We learnt also about dark chocolate’s many benefits, as superfood, antioxidant and a panacea for everything from reducing your risk of heart disease to improving blood circulation. We then slathered cocoa butter on our bodies in a self-massage workshop — because yes, the cocoa butter is a great moisturizer for your skin, among other things.
This chocolate workshop is well positioned at True Blue, which not only uses it for services at their Blue Haven Spa, like in their chocolate body scrub and body wraps, chocolate facial, massages and cocoa butter pedicure. The resort also has a small chocolate store on property, as well as an on-site kitchen that uses biogas (or renewal energy produced from the breakdown of organic waste) to produce all their chocolate goods.
And at their House of Chocolate in St. George’s (the island’s capital) they have a chocolate boutique with a small museum on site where you can learn how chocolate is produced from “tree to bar.” All Grenada’s chocolate makers control every aspect of the chocolate’s production, from harvesting cacao pods, to fermenting and drying the beans, roasting them, grinding them into a liquid, and then refining and tempering the chocolate before moulding it into bars.
At the 17th Century plantation Belmont Estate, for example, you can see the process through which cocoa beans are harvested and processed to make chocolate.
Grenada Wellness in Nature
Grenada is also a natural playground, where people can find a wellness-focused environment whether relaxing on a beach, hiking to waterfalls, soaking in sulphur springs or visiting an underwater sculpture park.
While we were there, we visited the 3,800-acre Grand Etang National Park, which boasts a rich variety of flora and fauna that you can learn about at their visitors’ centre. Inside the park is a crater lake, formed by a volcanic explosion, which continues to constitute one of the main water sources on the island. And at the southwestern entrance to the park is the “rainbow tree,” a giant eucalyptus tree whose bright colours are revealed through strips or layers of bark.
We also visit the 16-acre Lake Antoine, another crater lake in Grenada formed by an ancient volcano. We see Annandale Waterfalls, which is just one of the many waterfalls on the island. Other popular waterfalls include Mt. Carmel Falls, and Seven Sisters Falls, where you can do a 40-minute trek through the rainforest, and swim in a pool below the falls.
For me, the highlight was snorkelling in the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park, which we reached by short boat ride from the famous Grand Anse Beach with ECO Dive Grenada. A fascinating garden or underwater gallery, it consists of 75 works, the first instalment of which was completed by British sculptor and environmentalist Jason deCaires Taylor in 2006, and then expanded in 2023. The park was initially conceived as a way to divert divers away from the fragile, over-touristed coral reefs nearby.
Swimming through an underwater museum felt like a unique way to see art: viewing children holding hands in a circle and a man at a desk typing were just two of the dozens of works. With coral growing on the sculptures, years of erosion and fish swimming all around, I felt like a witness to a “living museum” where art is constantly shifting and changing through the years.
A second underwater sculpture park, “A World Adrift,” was launched in 2024 off the coast of Carriacou, a sister island to Grenada. Also by Jason deCaires Taylor, this sculpture park features 30 boats helmed by local schoolchildren, and designed to look like paper origami, to highlight the ecosystem’s fragility and the resilience of the children.
I am dying to go back to Grenada, both to explore this second sculpture garden, but also to experience more of the wellness I felt in a too short week there. I want to have a cocoa butter massage or a chocolate body scrub or both. I want to hike trails to waterfalls and dip into pools as the water cascades above me. And I want to do yoga again and feel that self-compassion and mindfulness that is best experienced in a space where cultivating a feeling of calm and connection feels easy and obvious.
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