Holidays in Trinidad and Tobago

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Trinidad and Tobago

An Instrument Invented Within Living Memory

Unusually for a major acoustic instrument, the steelpan's invention can be traced not to some distant, half-legendary past but to a specific handful of decades in twentieth-century Port of Spain. After British colonial authorities banned African-derived skin drums following the 1884 Canboulay Riots, fearing they could be used to coordinate unrest, Carnival musicians improvised a succession of substitutes: first tamboo bamboo, lengths of bamboo struck against the ground, then biscuit tins and dustbin lids, and by the mid-1930s scavenged metal objects including automobile brake hubs. Musicians in the city's poorer neighbourhoods discovered that careful, repeated hammering could tune small dents in these metal surfaces to distinct pitches, and by 1939 the first recognisable steel pans had emerged; Carnival of 1940 marked their first public appearance as a genuine musical ensemble rather than mere rhythmic noise.

The instrument's now-familiar form came together only after the Second World War, when the large American naval base at Chaguaramas left behind an abundant new supply of 55-gallon steel oil drums, which musicians including Ellie Mannette and Winston "Spree" Simon began shaping into the concave, multi-note surfaces still used today. By 1951, the instrument had travelled far enough from its origins that the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra performed at London's Festival of Britain, and in 1992 Prime Minister Patrick Manning formally declared the steelpan Trinidad and Tobago's national instrument, a designation the country's parliament reaffirmed by law in 2024, the year after the United Nations General Assembly established 11 August as World Steelpan Day, completing the journey of an instrument invented from wartime scrap into a globally recognised national symbol within roughly a single lifetime.

A Lake That Swallows Things and Gives Them Back

In the village of La Brea in southwest Trinidad lies the largest deposit of natural asphalt anywhere on Earth, a roughly hundred-acre lake of thick black pitch estimated to run some 250 feet deep and to hold more than ten million tons of material. The lake formed over thousands of years as tectonic subduction opened fault lines beneath the region, allowing crude oil from deep underground reservoirs to seep upward into an old volcanic crater, where exposure to air caused its lighter components to evaporate and left behind the heavy, viscous asphalt that remains today.

English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh is generally credited with introducing the lake to European knowledge in 1595, though the local Amerindian population had known and named it long before his arrival, guiding him to what they called Tierra de Brea. Raleigh found the material ideal for caulking his ships' hulls, reportedly praising it as superior to comparable pitch imported from Norway because it resisted melting in the sun. Commercial mining began in earnest in the late nineteenth century, and the asphalt has been extracted continuously ever since for use in roads and roofing worldwide, even as the lake's surface exhibits a peculiar, slow churning motion of its own, periodically swallowing objects, from prehistoric tree trunks to modern debris, that have been known to resurface, sometimes years later, in an entirely different part of the lake.

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