The Anegada Outback

The eastern end of the island, outside The Settlement, is a wild, unspoiled, and impenetrable land, called by some the Anegada Outback. Residents just call it the Bush. It is, at first glance, unwelcoming and harsh, but those who brave the thorns and sun of this landscape are richly rewarded by sights of unusual foliage, beautiful flowers, and a sense of silence remarkable even for Anegada.

Flora includes wild orchids, delicate pink flowers that poke up above the neighboring bushes on a single thin stem. There are also thickets of white frangipani, and huge century plants that bloom bright yellow in the late spring and early summer. Anegada is home to several species of plants that exist nowhere else in the world, including a prickly flowering bush known to islanders as “poke-me-boy” and a small flowering vine once used to manufacture fish traps. In many places, the plants grow miraculously from gnarled limestone earth.

The only way to explore the Outback is on foot. Only a few roads penetrate the wilderness, and they peter out after just a few hundred yards.