Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo: Where Sugar Built Everything

What's in a name

Couva's name comes from a mapmaker's ear: the first British map of Trinidad, in 1797, showed a river here called the "Rio de Cuba." In Spanish the B sounds like a V, so it became the Rio de Couva — then the Couva River, then the town. Tabaquite comes from the Taino word for tobacco, via the Spanish tabaco. The region's three names are three layers of the island's history.

A clearing in a sugarcane field

Couva was one of the oldest sugar villages, though cotton — not sugar — was the first crop in the Spanish era. For years it was, in the words of one history, "little more than a clearing in a sugarcane field," populated by Indian indentured workers and former African slaves, numbering only a few hundred. The railway's arrival in 1880 changed everything: people, goods, and news started moving, and Couva started growing.

During World War II, an emergency airstrip — Camden Auxiliary Air Base — was built near Couva. The town also became a political power base; the UNC party's headquarters was here for years.

Brechin Castle

The proud symbol of Couva's sugar industry was the Brechin Castle factory — the first central sugar factory in Trinidad and Tobago, and at the time the largest sugar factory in the British Empire. When the state sugar company, Caroni (1975) Ltd., closed on August 1, 2003, large-scale sugar production in Trinidad ended. The Brechin Castle and Ste. Madeleine factories were dismantled in 2009.

Ask anyone over forty in Couva about the closure and you'll get a story. Sugar wasn't just an industry here. It was the employer, the landlord, and the calendar.

What replaced the cane

Two things, mostly. First, industry: the Point Lisas Industrial Estate — established in 1976 on former Caroni sugar land in the Greater Couva area — is one of the Caribbean's great petrochemical parks, and its port ships the region's gas and steel to the world. Second, housing: the cane fields became residential developments, and Couva became a commuter town.

Tabaquite took a third path: from an important cocoa producer to one of the island's major vegetable growers — cassava, melongene, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, celery, chive, pumpkin, ochro, sweet corn. The wholesale markets still run on Tabaquite produce.

The tunnel

Tabaquite holds one of the great relics of the railway age: the Knollys Tunnel, about 660 feet long, the longest railway tunnel in the Caribbean. Named for acting colonial governor Sir Clement Courtenay Knollys, who opened it on August 20, 1898, it's the surviving evidence of a railway the island no longer has.

Ramleela country

The Hindu folk theater of the Ramayana — Ramleela — is performed across the region in the weeks before Divali, ending with the burning of Rawan's effigy. In Couva, the McBean Ramleela and Cultural Group performs at the McBean Recreation Ground: open-air theater, community cast, thousands watching. It's one of the living traditions the sugar estates left behind.

What to see

• The Knollys Tunnel, Tabaquite — the Caribbean's longest railway tunnel, from 1898.
• The Brechin Castle site, Couva — where the Empire's largest sugar factory stood.
• Point Lisas — the industrial estate and port that replaced the cane, west of Couva town.
• The McBean Ramleela — in the weeks before Divali.
• The Temple in the Sea, Waterloo — nearby, the Hindu heritage site on the Gulf.
• Brasso Venado and Carmelita Falls — the only two waterfalls in central Trinidad.

Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo is where the island's modern economy was built — first with cane, then with gas. The fields changed. The people didn't.