Senior Reporter
otto.carrington@cnc3.co.tt
The dam was never completed, but the village Lawrence Pereira knew as a boy had already been broken apart.
At 92, Caura’s eldest villager remembers people leaving their homes, families scattering to other communities and a beloved church being demolished for a project that would become one of Trinidad’s most troubling colonial development stories.
“They say all the people from up here have to leave and go,” Pereira recalled.
More than eight decades after the Government’s 1943 decision to establish a reservoir in Caura, his memories give a human voice to the history: the roads people walked, the homes they left and the community life that could not simply be rebuilt elsewhere.
For visitors who know Caura through a river outing, Pereira remembers another valley, one of cocoa estates, religious devotion and Christmas celebrations that carried neighbours from house to house.
“You had parang and things. People going house to house and having good time,” he said.
“So, it was lovely up here.”
Caura before the dam
Pereira’s account moves between childhood, displacement, family responsibilities and his eventual return. He said he was born in the upper community and had spent more than 50 years at his present location.
His earliest recollections include cocoa cultivation and an old road used by residents before the route he now points out became established.
“People had to walk through the old road there,” he said.
Those memories belong to a much longer history of settlement in the valley.
The National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago records that Indigenous people from the established Nepuyo communities of Caura, Tacarigua and Arouca were relocated to Arima in 1785. Caura’s history therefore reaches back beyond the cocoa estates and the village Pereira knew, into the island’s Indigenous and Spanish colonial past.
By the late 19th century, Caura had developed into a substantial agricultural community. The Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago records a population of 989 in 1871, rising to 1,467 in 1881. Its account describes a village that retained a strong Spanish cultural character, with shops, tradespeople, a school and a church.
Displacement and a failed project
In 1943, however, the colonial government decided to establish a reservoir covering approximately 300 acres. According to the dictionary, the village had been evacuated by 1946. The dam project was never completed, becoming embroiled in a corruption scandal and investigation.
For Pereira, that history is remembered through the departure of people he knew.
“Some gone to St John. Some gone to South,” he said.
“And from there, everything started to change.”
His recollections return repeatedly to the old church at La Veronica. He remembers its appearance, its importance and the priest’s opposition to its destruction.
“That was the best church in the whole of the island in Trinidad,” he said.
It is the judgement of someone for whom the building remains inseparable from home.
Pereira said he had been confirmed there. He recalled the priest arguing that the proposed reservoir’s water would not reach the church and that there was no reason to demolish it.
“The priest tell them, don’t damage the church,” he said.
He also recounted a warning attributed to the priest: that nothing would succeed on the site after the church’s destruction. That account belongs to the village’s oral tradition, rather than an established explanation for the dam’s failure.
A church that survived
What church records do confirm is that the displaced community carried parts of its religious life into another valley.
In an August 2023 account marking the 75th anniversary of La Veronica RC Church in Lopinot, CatholicTT described the trauma experienced by residents uprooted from La Veronica, Caura, in the early 1940s.
Items salvaged after the old church’s demolition were used to help build the Lopinot church in 1948. The account explains that its two entrance pillars reflected the community’s desire for a church resembling the one left behind.
That connection gives the story a life beyond the abandoned project. Some of what Caura lost survived through the people who moved: their worship, their memories and their determination to create a familiar place in unfamiliar surroundings.
For Pereira, however, returning to Caura has not meant recovering the community of his childhood.
A community changed
He remembers the pleasure of people visiting one another at Christmas. When asked about the village today, his concern was the distance he now feels between residents.
“People up here not getting together,” he said.
His account also carries concern about development and the treatment of the river. These are his observations as a resident whose relationship with the valley stretches across generations, and whose expectations are shaped by the community he remembers.
Away from the larger history, his life has involved work, caring for family and maintaining a home.
He spoke of supporting his father until his death and arranging his burial. Now retired, Pereira said he lives on his pension and tends his own garden.
“I’m making my own garden and things,” he said.
The detail connects his present life to the agricultural landscape of his earliest memories. Long after the cocoa village was dispersed, he still cultivates the ground around him.
Yet he offers no easy optimism when asked what he wants for Caura.
“I don’t see them doing anything in Caura,” he said.
His disappointment gives the familiar river valley another dimension. Behind the outings and the scenery is a history of people being asked to surrender their homes for a public promise that went unfulfilled.
At 92, Pereira can still recall the old road, the church and the Christmas visits. In his telling, the deepest loss is the life neighbours once shared.
“People going house to house and having good time.”
It is that Caura he remembers.
