Livingston

Livingston stands where the Río Dulce, having cut its gorge through the hills, meets Amatique Bay on the Gulf of Honduras. Its Garifuna founders were part of a people descended from West Africans and the Carib and Arawak islanders of St Vincent, whom the British deported to the island of Roatán, off Honduras, in 1797; from there they spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America and north into Guatemala and Belize, settling fishing villages such as this one.

The town takes its name from Edward Livingston, the American jurist whose legal codes, translated into Spanish by José Francisco Barrundia, were used as the basis for the laws of the liberal government of the United Provinces of Central America in the early 19th century; in Guatemala the plan was cut short by Rafael Carrera's conservative revolt of 1838. When the Jesuits returned to Guatemala under Carrera around 1851, they settled first in Livingston, and the town's border with British Honduras was fixed by the Wyke-Aycinena treaty of 1859.

Before Puerto Barrios was built at the end of the 19th century, Livingston was Guatemala's main port on the Caribbean and the capital of Izabal. A description of 1902 found its people building canoes, raising pigs, fishing and farming maize, bananas and cassava. The port moved away, but the town kept its Garifuna character, and from 1970 it was included with the rest of Izabal in the Franja Transversal del Norte development zone. In recent decades it has built a large tourist industry around its culture and the river.

Livingston is a mainly Garifuna town, known for its mix of Garifuna, Afro-Caribbean, Maya and Ladino people and cultures. Garifuna, an Arawakan language that survives from the Island Carib speech of the Lesser Antilles, is spoken in the streets beside Spanish, Q'eqchi' and English, and the town's music and dance carry Garifuna identity more than anything else. UNESCO has recognised the Garifuna language, dance and music as part of the intangible heritage of humanity.

Punta, the best-known Garifuna dance, with its African and Arawak roots, is danced on beaches, in parks and at funerals, and drumming fills the town's bars most nights. Groups of local musicians go from restaurant to restaurant with large drums, a turtle shell, a conch and maracas, chanting traditional songs over the beat. Spiritual practices such as the dugu ceremony remain widespread among the Garifuna.

Q'eqchi' Maya and Ladino people make up much of the rest of the town, and their traditions sit alongside those of the Garifuna. Shops along Calle Principal sell jewellery made from shells and coconut, embroidery, and small bottles of guifiti.

Livingston was traditionally a fishing town, and the sea and river still feed it, but in recent decades it has developed a large tourist industry, with guesthouses, restaurants, boatmen and guides along the main street and the waterfront. The wider municipality, which reaches inland across forest and farmland, lives from cattle and oil palm, and has also seen oil exploration.

Life revolves around the dock. Boats bring in supplies, visitors and people from Puerto Barrios and the river villages, and Calle Principal climbs from the water past shops, restaurants and bars to the town's houses. In the evenings families and children gather at the central beach, where children fly kites and local people swim.

Isolation shapes everything. With no road, goods arrive by water, and travel to the rest of the country means a boat ride before any bus. Heavy rain falls in almost every month, and after storms the beaches can be littered with plastic washed in from the sea, which workers are sent to clear.

Livingston's cooking is Garifuna and Caribbean, built on fish, coconut, plantain and cassava. The defining dish is tapado, a rich soup of fish, prawns and shellfish cooked in coconut milk with plantain and garnished with coriander, served with bread. Hudut, fish in coconut milk with mashed plantain, is another Garifuna dish, and cassava bread and coconut bread are staples.

Rice and beans, the Caribbean dish of rice cooked with beans in coconut milk, is the everyday plate, often served with stewed chicken, and grilled shrimp is cheap and widely sold. As a traditional fishing town, Livingston has seafood in almost every restaurant along Calle Principal and the streets running off it. After dark a few stalls also sell pupusas, the stuffed maize cakes from neighbouring El Salvador.

The local drinks are as distinctive. Coco loco is a fresh coconut with its top cut off and a generous measure of rum poured in, and guifiti is a Garifuna rum infused with herbs and roots, sold in small bottles and said to have medicinal properties. Both are drunk to the sound of Garifuna drums in the bars by the water.