An Affront to Adventure Travel… and everyone… in Grenada

Selling an entire National Park to a resort developer? With Pombo out, we can be fortunate to know that this headline couldn’t be from the U.S. It’s actually from the Government of Grenada. Caribbean Net News has this scoop:

The Mount Hartman National Park – also called ‘The Dove Sanctuary’ – in the south-west of Grenada, reportedly supports at least 22% of the global population of the Grenada Dove — equating to just 20 pairs. With such a low population in just a few remnant patches of forest, Grenada Dove is facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the near future.

The Sanctuary was created 10 years ago, in order to mitigate for habitat removal elsewhere on the island, partly from development. This year saw the opening of a visitor centre to mark the educational value of the park for tourists and local people. But now the proposed hotel project, supported by the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts group, plans a 150 room hotel, 300 luxury villas as well as a golf course, marina and conference centre. Dove Sanctuary was chosen on the basis of its natural surroundings, a rare commodity in Grenada today, and the unimpeded sea-views that abound throughout it….

Respected authors, Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, Honorary Patrons of BirdLife’s Rare Bird Club, have notably lent their support to the protest: “There’s a terrible irony in the Government’s willingness to critically compromise the continued existence of the Grenada Dove – which as the island’s National Bird is a symbol of the country’s distinctiveness and its culture – simply to provide sea-views to people from away. They should build somewhere else.”