Senior Reporter
otto.carrington@cnc3.co.tt
Just beyond the northwestern peninsula of Trinidad, where the Gulf of Paria meets the Bocas del Dragón, Chacachacare rises from the sea like a fragment of another time.
To the passing boater, it is green, quiet and inviting.
To those who step ashore, it is something else entirely, a place where history has not been erased, only left exposed to wind, salt and silence.
Chacachacare is often described in simple terms: an abandoned island, a former leprosarium, a weekend destination for divers and hikers. But its real story stretches far deeper than its ruins suggest.
It is an island shaped by Indigenous presence, colonial extraction, revolutionary ambition, medical fear, global war, and finally abandonment. It is also an island where memory has taken on a life of its own.
Long before European arrival, archaeological evidence shows that Indigenous peoples used the island seasonally, leaving behind pottery fragments and shell middens that speak of fishing camps tied to the rich waters of the Bocas. The island was never isolated in their world. It was part of a living maritime corridor between Trinidad and the South American mainland.
When Christopher Columbus passed through the Bocas in 1498, during his third voyage, the island entered European records.
He anchored nearby in waters he named Puerto de los Gatos, reportedly mistaking the cries of howler monkeys for wild cats. From that moment, Chacachacare became part of a wider colonial map that would reshape its destiny.
In 1813, the island briefly shifted from colonial outpost to revolutionary staging ground when Venezuelan independence leader Santiago Mariño gathered a small force there before launching an expedition against Spanish forces on the mainland. From this quiet island, a campaign was born that would feed into the broader liberation of northern South America, giving Chacachacare an unexpected role in continental history.
Yet it was not war or industry that defined the island most deeply. It was disease.
By the mid-nineteenth century, leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease, had become one of the most feared conditions in the colonial Caribbean. Though later understood to be curable, at the time it carried a stigma that led to strict isolation policies. In Trinidad, a leprosarium was established at Cocorite in 1845, but overcrowding and fear soon made it unsustainable.
The solution, driven by colonial public health thinking of complete separation, was Chacachacare.
In the early 1920s, patients were transferred across the narrow stretch of water separating the island from Trinidad.
Many left knowing they would not return. Families were separated permanently.
Children grew up on one side of the Bocas while parents lived and died on the other.
Coco Bay and Sanders Bay became the main settlements for men and women, respectively, forming a structured but isolated community that included hospital wards, workshops, dormitories, chapels, agricultural plots and a cemetery that slowly filled over decades.
Life on the island was not only defined by confinement, but it was also shaped by care.
The Dominican Sisters of St Catherine of Siena, who had arrived in Trinidad in the nineteenth century, continued their work in the leprosarium, tending to patients, managing daily life and providing emotional and spiritual support in conditions few others were willing to endure. Some of the sisters contracted the disease themselves through prolonged exposure.
Among the most remembered is Sister Rose de Sainte Marie Vebert, whose death in 1937 is recorded in historical accounts as a moment of profound loss within the colony, where hymns were sung at her bedside as she passed.
Even within isolation, the island developed its own internal society. Patients worked, farmed, cooked, worshipped and maintained routines that gave structure to life under medical segregation. In 1945, Indo-Trinidadian patients constructed a small Hindu mandir that still stands today, one of the few surviving symbols of the island’s cultural diversity during its time as a medical settlement.
During the Second World War, Chacachacare also became part of the wider defensive network of the Caribbean. American military forces operated in the Bocas region under wartime agreements, adding a brief but significant layer of military presence to an island already defined by separation and control.
By the mid-twentieth century, however, medicine began to change the island’s fate. The introduction of sulfone drugs and later multidrug therapy transformed Hansen’s disease from a lifelong condition into a treatable illness.
In 1984, the leprosarium officially closed after more than six decades of continuous operation. Patients were resettled or reintegrated into society. The Dominican Sisters departed. Administrative oversight faded. And the island, once carefully maintained as a medical settlement, was left largely to nature and decay.
It is in this silence that another layer of Chacachacare’s identity emerged.
Boaters tell of island’s silence and secrets
They say Chacachacare is quiet after sunset. Not the kind of quiet that belongs to an empty island, but a deeper silence—one that feels watched.
Boaters who anchor in the Bocas speak of it in lowered voices, as if sound itself carries further across that stretch of water at night.
The stories are rarely told the same way twice, but they circle back to the same details: a faint glow moving through the trees where no lamps should be, the distant sound of bells that no longer exist, and footsteps on old stone paths swallowed long ago by vines and forest.
Some insist it is nothing more than wind moving through broken structures; others say the island remembers too much to ever be empty.
The most repeated accounts come from fishermen who have worked these waters for decades.
They speak of figures in white moving between the ruins of the old convent and the abandoned hospital wards, slow, deliberate shapes that vanish when approached too closely.
There are stories of singing carried across still water, soft and distant, as though coming from a chapel that has not held a congregation in years.
According to repeated accounts circulating within the boating community, members of a patrol unit of the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard assigned to the island in the late twentieth century reportedly experienced unexplained disturbances while stationed there overnight. These stories describe sudden drops in temperature within sealed structures, footsteps heard in empty corridors, and movement detected around abandoned buildings after dusk.
In some versions of the account, personnel are said to have reported seeing figures dressed in white habits moving between the former convent and hospital buildings before disappearing into the forest line.
No official Coast Guard statement, operational log or government report has ever been released to substantiate these claims, and they are not part of the formal historical record of Chacachacare.
However, the story has persisted in Trinidad and Tobago’s maritime oral tradition, repeated by fishermen, boat operators, and weekend visitors who describe the island as unusually quiet after dark quiet enough, they say, that any sound feels amplified across the water.
As with much of Chacachacare’s reputation, the account sits in the space between lived experience and collective storytelling—where documented history ends, and folklore begins to take shape.
Somewhere between the hospital records and the whispered accounts on fishing boats, Chacachacare became something else entirely.
Not just an island in the Bocas but a place people still swear is not empty.
