Road Town

The town takes its name from a sailors' term: "the roads" is an anchorage less sheltered than a harbour but easy for ships to reach, and the horseshoe of Road Harbour in the middle of Tortola's south coast gave the colony its port. Dutch settlers are thought to have fortified the shore first; the English, who took Tortola in 1672, rebuilt the defences at the outbreak of the American War of Independence. By the late 18th century a ring of forts guarded the town — Fort Burt to the south-west, Fort George above Baughers Bay to the north-east, a fort in the town itself and Fort Charlotte high on Harrigan's Hill. Fort Burt never fired a shot in anger under British command. The prison on Main Street, built in 1774, is the oldest building still standing.

On 1 August 1834 the Slavery Abolition Act was read aloud at the Sunday Morning Well in Road Town. Freedom did not bring prosperity: in 1853 rioters protesting against an increase in the cattle tax set a fire that destroyed nearly every building in the town, and went on to burn most of the plantations on the island.

Much of the modern town stands on reclaimed land. Wickhams Cay and Little Wickhams Cay, two islands in the harbour, were joined to the shore by land reclamation; the long leases granted to a British businessman caused protests led by Noel Lloyd, and the British government cancelled them and paid compensation. The reclaimed land became the commercial and government centre and the base of the charter-yacht fleet. In September 2017 Hurricane Irma, the most intense storm ever to hit the territory, devastated Road Town along with the rest of Tortola.

As the capital, Road Town is where the territory's long-settled families and its newcomers meet. Only 37 per cent of the territory's people were born in it, and many workers come from elsewhere in the eastern Caribbean. Belonger identity — English-speaking, Christian and descended from the enslaved Africans and post-emancipation smallholders — remains strong, and Methodism runs deep.

The traditional music is fungi, named after the cornmeal dish. Its "scratch bands" play calabash, washboard, bongos and ukulele alongside keyboards, banjo, guitar and saxophone, and the songs often carry humorous social commentary and pieces of island oral history. It is heard above all at the August Festival, the emancipation carnival held over three days from the first Monday in August, which recalls the reading of the abolition act in the town in 1834.

The sea shapes the rest of the calendar. Boat-building and sloop racing are part of the heritage, and since 1972 the Spring Regatta has brought a week of races, parties and crowds to the harbour each spring. It remains a small, conservative community, and smoking in businesses and public places is taboo.

About 15,000 people lived in Road Town in 2018, by far the largest settlement in the territory. Its boundaries are a matter of local debate: whether the town begins at Road Reef or at the sign at the foot of Slaney Hill to the west, and whether Baughers Bay to the east counts, depends on whom one asks.

The capital runs on two industries. Financial services — the registration and administration of the hundreds of thousands of companies incorporated in the BVI — fill the office buildings of Wickhams Cay and provide the bulk of government revenue. Tourism fills the marinas: Road Town is one of the principal bareboat-chartering centres in the Caribbean, ferries leave the harbour all day for the other islands and St Thomas, and cruise ships regularly tie up at the pier, bringing business that matters to the island's large and politically important taxi-driving community.

Life is car-dependent and tied to the ferry timetable, and the long recovery from Irma, which flattened much of the territory's building stock in 2017, still shows. Politics have been turbulent: in 2022, after the elected premier was arrested in the United States on drug-trafficking charges, a UK-appointed commission of inquiry recommended suspending the constitution; London held off pending governance reforms, and elected government has continued.

Road Town eats like the rest of the territory, only with more choice. The local table is Caribbean and centred on the sea: conch, fresh fish, and "fish and fungi", fish served with fungi, a polenta-like dish of cornmeal and okra. Callaloo, a soup of leafy greens, salt-fish pates — fried pastries filled with salt cod — and johnnycake, a fried bread, are everyday food, and roadside stops west of town sell johnnycakes and patties.

Roti is a Road Town staple: a soft flatbread wrapped around curried vegetables, chicken or goat, sold from small places on Main Street. Bakeries supply sandwiches and pastries, and the big supermarkets stock everything a charter crew needs before setting sail. Much of the territory's fresh fish and lobster comes from Anegada, to the north.

Rum is the local spirit. At Cane Garden Bay over the hill, a historic distillery makes it, and the town's bars pour the Painkiller — rum with pineapple juice, orange juice and cream of coconut, dusted with nutmeg — which was created in the 1970s on Jost Van Dyke. Bars stay open late at weekends, and the waterfront is where the expatriate workers, yacht crews and visitors meet after dark.