2 Best Sights in Martinique

A stone building that held the kitchen of the estate where Joséphine grew up houses the Musée de la Pagerie. It contains an assortment of memorabilia pertaining to her life and rather unfortunate loves, including a marriage certificate and a love letter written straight from the heart by Napoléon in 1796. The main house blew down in the hurricane of 1766, when she was three, and the family lived for years above the sugarcane factory—a hot, smelly, and fly-ridden existence. At 16 she was wed (an arranged marriage because her father was a gambling man in need of money) to Alexandre de Beauharnais. After he was assassinated during the Revolution, she married Napoléon and substantially improved her station in life. This museum is not a must-do in Martinique, but if you have some time and are in Trois-Îlets it offers an interesting bit of island history about a girl who made good.

Museum hours sometimes change, so be sure to call in advance.

A hidden treasure with an unassuming entrance just down the street from the Hotel L'Impératrice, this multistory archaeological museum houses some 2,000 Indigenous artifacts. English-speaking guides are sometimes available. Kids take to this museum, "digging" the early peashooters, poison darts, hammocks that took a year to make, and the shaman's headdress. Also fascinating is the jewelry fashioned from natural materials, boar tusks, and bird feathers. A good time to sample this dose of prehistory is on a typically hot city day, for the air-conditioning is frigid.