Car hire in Fort-de-France

Balata Garden — about 20 minutes up the Route de la Trace. The finest climb on the island; go in the morning as the mist lifts.

Les Trois-Îlets and Anse Mitan — about 30 minutes by road, or the ferry from the waterfront if you leave the car behind.

Le Diamant — about 40 minutes. The rock, the vast beach, and the wind dropping in late afternoon.

Saint-Pierre — about 45 minutes along the Caribbean coast. The former capital, its ruins and its black sand beaches.

Sainte-Anne and Les Salines — about an hour. The picture-postcard south; go early to beat the crowds and the heat.

Mount Pelée and the north — allow 1h15 to 1h30 to the trailheads. A full day, and a car is essential.

Journey times are indicative, outside rush hour.

This is the question we are asked most at the desk, and the answer changed recently: street parking is chargeable again in the city centre after six years of being free. The old meters, out of service since 2018, have been replaced by new ones. If you are going on a guidebook from last year, or on the memory of an earlier visit, the information is out of date.

The chargeable zone is bounded by the canal Levassor, the boulevard du Général-de-Gaulle, la Savane and the waterfront — in other words the whole shopping and administrative heart of the city. Outside that quadrilateral, street parking is free.

Payment is by bank card at the meter, not in cash. This is what catches visitors out most: they hunt for coins the machines will not take. The rate and the maximum stay are displayed on each meter, and they change — read them rather than trusting a figure found online. A penalty charge applies if the ticket is missing or has expired.

Our honest advice: if you are staying in town for more than an hour, a covered car park often works out cheaper than the street and saves you watching the clock. Three of them serve the centre.

Parking Perrinon is the most convenient for the shopping and administrative centre. Underground, more than five hundred spaces, CCTV throughout, lifts and four pedestrian exits. Two entry ramps: at the junction of rue de la République and rue Victor Sévère, or from rue Moreau de Jonnès. It is the one we point our customers to by default.

Pointe Simon car park serves the waterfront, the tower, the seafront restaurants and the ferry landing. The right choice if you are leaving the car to cross the bay for the day.

La Savane car park sits beside the park of the same name, the museum and the market. In heavy demand late on Saturday mornings — arrive before ten if the market is your target.

When not to drive

Fort-de-France holds most of the island's jobs, and the traffic follows office hours with mechanical regularity. From 7 to 8.30 am and from 4 to 6 pm, the road towards Le Lamentin saturates. A journey that takes fifteen minutes at ten in the morning can take forty at five in the afternoon.

Two practical consequences. If your flight leaves in the late afternoon, leave Fort-de-France with plenty of margin: it is the most expensive miscalculation of the whole trip. And if you are heading out for the day, get out of the city before seven: you save time on the road and you reach the sites before the heat and before the crowds.

Outside those two windows, driving in Fort-de-France is straightforward. Most streets in the centre are one-way, the lanes are narrow, and an up-to-date GPS will spare you a few U-turns — but nothing here is difficult.

Once you leave the city, Martinique's roads present no particular difficulty: narrow and winding in the north, but well maintained. Our page on driving in Martinique covers what to know before you take the wheel.

Fort-de-France is the natural starting point for almost everything people come to Martinique to see, because four routes leave it and between them they serve the whole island. Knowing which one to take is half the job.

The A1 motorway, east and south. The island's only dual carriageway. It runs to Le Lamentin, the airport and the Carrère junction, where you branch either towards Le Marin and Sainte-Anne or towards Le François and Le Robert. Every beach in the south goes through there.

The Caribbean coast road, north-west. It hugs the sea through Schœlcher, Case-Pilote, Bellefontaine and Le Carbet up to Saint-Pierre. The most beautiful of the four, with the sea on your left almost the whole way, and by far the slowest: village follows village and you crawl through them. Allow generously.

The Route de la Trace, inland. It climbs through rainforest past Morne Rouge, serves the Jardin de Balata and reaches the north over the heights. Winding, often in cloud, superb. An hour of driving that is worth a visit in itself.

The ring road. It bypasses the centre to the north and spares you crossing Fort-de-France when you are only passing through. Use it by default unless the centre is your destination — except at rush hour, when it saturates too.

From our Pointe des Grives agency you are on the A1 within minutes without going through the centre. That is one of the reasons we are based there rather than downtown.

Cruise ships berth at Pointe Simon, in the heart of the city, or at Pointe des Grives — which is where our agency is. Most calls give you somewhere between six and nine hours ashore, and what you do with them depends almost entirely on whether you have a car.

On foot, you get Fort-de-France. The Schœlcher library, Saint-Louis cathedral, the Savane park, Fort Saint-Louis, the covered market and the shopping streets all sit within a few hundred metres of the berth. It is a genuinely pleasant half-day and it costs you nothing.

With a car, the island opens. In a day ashore you can comfortably reach the southern beaches — Les Anses-d'Arlet in about forty-five minutes, Sainte-Anne and the Grande Anse des Salines in an hour — or go north to Saint-Pierre and the foot of Mount Pelée. A rum distillery, a beach and lunch in a beach restaurant fit into a single call without rushing.

Two rules we give every cruise customer. Book before you sail, because a ship puts two thousand people ashore at once and the island does not hold that many spare cars. And plan to be back at the berth ninety minutes before all-aboard — not because the roads are difficult, but because an accident on the single motorway has nowhere to divert to.

We deliver to the cruise terminal and to the Express des Îles ferry terminal, with the keys handed over at the quay. Tell us your ship and your call times when you book and we work backwards from them.

Your licence. A French or EU licence is enough, with no formality. Martinique is a French département: same highway code, same signs, same 50 km/h limit in built-up areas. Drivers from outside the European Union need an International Driving Permit alongside their national licence.

Age. You must be 21 or over with at least one year's licence. We charge no young-driver surcharge: the advertised rate is the rate you pay, whatever your age.

The deposit. It is taken as a card pre-authorisation when you collect the car and released when you return it. The amount depends on the category. We set out the mechanism, the excess and the buy-down options on our deposit and insurance page — it is where unpleasant surprises happen most often in this trade, which is exactly why we put it in writing.

Fuel. Prices in Martinique are regulated: set each month by prefectoral order and therefore identical at every filling station on the island. There is no point hunting for a cheaper one, it does not exist. Our cars go out full and come back full.

Mileage is unlimited across the fleet. The island is seventy kilometres from north to south, and a week of intensive sightseeing rarely passes eight hundred kilometres — but a mileage cap would be a pointless constraint, so we do not impose one.

A second driver is included at no extra charge, provided they meet the same age and licence conditions and are named on the contract. On a holiday with a lot of driving, being able to swap changes how the end of the day feels.