Fort de France is a very unusual place for the Caribbean. There sitting in the middle of the city is the stunning Bibliothèque Schoelcher, a 19th century wrought iron, wood and glass library built originally in Paris for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was then broken down into pieces and sent to Martinique where it was reopened across from the city’s central park, called La Savane.

The streets are jammed during the day (it gets pretty quiet at night) with a mixture of islanders and day trippers who offload from the cruise ships. The city, with a population of about 100,000, is large enough that it has a professional class that can support (with help from the French government) a place like Tropiques Atrium, a music, dance and visual arts center.

But Martinique, which is 50 miles long and 22 miles across at its widest point (about the size of New York City), is also an island where nearly 40 percent of the landmass is forest. The island is also almost entirely free of all-inclusive resorts (there is just one, Club Med Buccaneer’s Creek) meaning you really need to get out and see Martinique on your own when you visit.

And while Martinique is very much a part of France — most of the tourists are French, meaning you can go days without running into any Americans — it also has its own rich history and culture. These traditions actually are becoming more prominent on the island in recent years, as younger islanders look for ways to try to reconnect with their culture. That includes Renaud Bonard, a one-time highway surveyor who after a motorcycle injury decided to open up a small dance center he calls Lakou A in Gros Morne, the sparsely populated, rural section of the island.