Grand Turk

The Lucayan people, the island's first inhabitants, called it Abawana, "the first small land"; the Spanish later knew it as Amuana. Some historians have argued that Grand Turk, not an island in the Bahamas, was where Columbus first landed in 1492, a claim others reject. The island's English name is usually traced to the Turk's cap cactus, whose red top recalls a fez. Bermudians colonised it in 1681 and set up the salt industry, and Cockburn Town, the first permanent settlement in the islands, became the seat of government in 1766.

Salt shaped everything that followed. In 1754 British warships cut down French marks of possession on the island. A hurricane in September 1813 destroyed more than 120 houses, and the reefs around the island claimed ship after ship. In 1836 Grand Turk was declared a free port, and in 1852 a lighthouse, prefabricated in England, went up on the northern bluff to make the passage safer and save the declining salt trade. The prison on Pond Street, built in the 1830s, stayed in use until 1994.

In the Cold War the island became a station for the United States. A naval facility of the undersea surveillance network opened near the lighthouse in 1954 and ran until 1980, and the island became the first down-range station of the US Air Force's Eastern Range with a missile impact location array. In 1962 John Glenn's Friendship 7 capsule came down off the south-east shore after the first American orbital flight. Tourism was courted from the 1950s, and in 2004 plans were announced for a cruise port, which has since made the island a regular cruise stop.

Grand Turk is the administrative, historic and cultural centre of the territory. Its townscape is the clearest survival of the salt era: Duke Street and Front Street are lined with 18th- and 19th-century houses in the Bermudian style, with long, narrow streets and old street lamps. The town is named after Francis Cockburn, a former Governor of the Bahamas.

The Turks and Caicos National Museum keeps the islands' memory. Housed in Guinep House, a building more than 180 years old that was partly built from shipwreck timber, including a ship's mast, it shows the Molasses Reef Wreck, considered the oldest known European shipwreck in the Americas, alongside exhibits on the Lucayans, slavery and the slave trade, the salt and sisal industries, postage stamps and the space race. Its Message in a Bottle project has recorded nearly 40 years of messages washed up on the island's shores.

Music is part of island evenings: the island's best-known party band plays soca and island music, with a saw player in its line-up. The Grand Turk Parade Ground in Cockburn Town hosts athletics, cricket, rugby and football, and has also been the setting for state occasions such as the funeral of the territory's first Chief Minister. Watching the sunset, and the green flash that locals insist is not so elusive, is an island habit.

About 4,800 people lived on Grand Turk in 2012, the second-largest population of any island in the territory. As home to the capital it holds the government offices, courts and the territory's administration, and it is also a financial centre. Cockburn Town spreads across most of the island, and its sole high school is HJ Robinson High School.

Tourism is the other pillar. The cruise terminal at the south end draws ships travelling between Florida and the Caribbean, and on busy days passengers fill the beaches, tours and the tourist village, then leave by evening. Diving brings a smaller, steadier stream of visitors, drawn by the coral wall a short boat ride from shore.

Life away from the cruise centre is slow and small-scale. Most food and goods are imported, and the airport, about a mile south of town, links residents with Providenciales and the other islands by short domestic flights. Like the rest of the territory, Grand Turk lies in the hurricane belt.

The food is that of the islands as a whole, built on the sea. Conch is the staple — cracked (pounded and fried), as fritters, in chowder, or raw as conch salad with lime — and grouper, snapper and spiny lobster round out the seafood. Johnnycake is the traditional side.

In Cockburn Town, meals are eaten at a small number of local restaurants and bars, some of them along historic Front Street. On cruise days the restaurants and bars of the terminal's tourist village feed most of the visitors. Rum is the usual drink, and nearly everything in the shops is imported, so fresh fish and conch are the most local things on any menu.

Salt, the island's old staple, survives as a product rather than an industry: sea salt and bath salts from neighbouring Salt Cay are sold in the national museum's shop, alongside straw hats and baskets from Middle Caicos and sea-glass jewellery made from glass found on the beaches. For centuries salt, along with small exports of sponge and hemp, sustained the islands.