Culebra

During the Spanish colonisation the island is believed to have been home to Caribs, and after the Taíno rebellion of 1511 on the main island, Taíno refugees used Culebra as a base, allying with Caribs to raid the estates. For centuries afterwards it was a refuge for pirates, fishermen and sailors rather than a settlement. Lasting settlement began only on 27 October 1880, when Cayetano Escudero Sanz completed a survey dividing the island into lots, and the first village was named San Ildefonso. With no streams, the settlers depended on rain for drinking water. Construction of the Culebrita lighthouse began in 1882.

After 1898 the United States Navy took a strong interest in the deep sheltered harbour. In 1902, citing the Foraker Act, it expropriated land around the harbour and ordered settlers to leave so that a fleet base could be built; a new town was laid out at Playa Sardinas and named Dewey. A bird refuge was established in 1909. The Navy held annual manoeuvres to practise amphibious landings, and the archipelago was later used for gunnery and bombing practice.

In 1971 islanders began the Navy-Culebra protests, demanding the Navy's removal, and in 1975 the gunnery range was closed and operations moved to Vieques. The area around Flamenco Beach, used as a weapons-testing ground for more than 30 years, was left with two rusting tanks. In September 2017 Hurricane Irma caused major damage, and Hurricane Maria later that month caused more.

Culebrenses, as the islanders are known, share a history shaped by the long struggle with the Navy and by the island's small size. Its nicknames include Isla Chiquita ("little island"), Cuna del Sol Borincano ("cradle of the Puerto Rican sun") and Última Virgen ("last virgin"), the last for its position at the western end of the smaller islands of the Virgin Islands archipelago.

Community life centres on the plaza in Dewey, with its Catholic church and municipal buildings, where the patron-saint festival of Nuestra Señora del Carmen is held each July. Development has been recent and slow, the island is still mostly woodland, and it remains a backcountry destination away from crowds and large resorts.

The sea is at the centre of life. Shallow reefs surround the island, and its seabird colonies and the beaches where leatherback, green and hawksbill turtles nest are protected by the national wildlife refuge, which Theodore Roosevelt's government first set aside as a bird refuge in 1909. A regular crowd of expatriates has become part of the island's small community.

Culebra had 1,792 people at the 2020 census, the fewest of any municipality in Puerto Rico. Dewey, the island's only town, had 462 residents in 2010, and the island is divided into five barrios plus the town centre. The island measures only about five miles by seven. It was joined to Vieques in 1902 and declared an independent island municipality in 1917, and today it has the highest share of non-Hispanic residents of any municipality in Puerto Rico, at 10.8 per cent in 2020.

Farming once sustained the island, which exported products ranging from wood, fish, cattle and goats to plantains, yams and cotton. Today its main sources of income are construction and tourism, and the ferry is extremely busy in high season, on holidays and in the summer months.

Daily life depends on links with the main island. Groceries come from a few small colmados, the largest of them near the airport, and for medical emergencies patients are flown to Fajardo. Like the rest of Puerto Rico, the island lives with the possibility of power cuts and storms.

Culebra's food is Puerto Rico's cocina criolla, with an island emphasis on seafood. Rice and beans, fried plantains and mofongo, mashed fried green plantain with garlic and pork crackling, appear alongside fish and other seafood. Fritters such as alcapurrias and bacalaítos, salt-cod fritters, are typical snacks.

The kiosks at Flamenco Beach are the island's best-known places to eat: about half a dozen stands sell piña coladas, mango smoothies, rice-and-beans burritos and seafood from conch salad to fish skewers, and vendors at the entrance grill meat on sticks. In Dewey a handful of restaurants and bars line the canal and the streets near the ferry, some popular with boaters who tie up their dinghies alongside.

The island's few grocery stores, known as colmados, are small, and one of them is the island's only source of fresh meat. Rum, Puerto Rico's spirit, goes into the beach kiosks' piña coladas, and some of the island's restaurants mix Puerto Rican cooking with other cuisines for a clientele of locals and expatriates.