Anguilla

The Arawak, who called the island Malliouhana, left petroglyphs in its caves. English settlers came from St Kitts in 1650, but Anguilla was too dry and flat for a plantation economy: people lived by smallholding, salt-raking, fishing, and boatbuilding, and, when times were hard, by emigrating in search of work elsewhere.

Governed as part of a three-island colony with St Kitts and Nevis, Anguillians grew resentful of rule from Basseterre. In 1967 they expelled the St Kitts police and declared independence — from the federation, while wanting to remain British. The stand-off ended in 1969 with a near-comic British intervention by paratroopers and London police, and Anguilla was allowed to revert to direct British administration, formally becoming a separate territory in 1980.

In recent decades Anguilla has become a deliberately up-market tourist destination. Hurricane Irma caused severe damage in September 2017 — the most powerful hurricane to hit the island, with around USD 320 million of material damage; the infrastructure was repaired over 2018 and 2019 and the economy began to recover in 2019. More recently the island's ".ai" internet domain, sought after by artificial-intelligence companies, has become a large source of government revenue alongside tourism and offshore finance.

Anguillian culture is English-speaking and Christian, descended from enslaved and free Africans and the island's smallholder and seafaring society. Boat racing — not cricket — is the national sport: hand-built wooden sloops with towering sails are raced on public holidays, and crews and home villages are followed with fierce loyalty, the season climaxing at the August festival.

Lobster Fest, the sailboat races and the Summer Festival, or Carnival, which marks Emancipation around August Monday, are the high points of the year. It is a quiet, conservative, tight-knit community of around 15,000, with many Anguillians living abroad and strong ties back and forth.

About 15,000 people live on Anguilla, with the low-key settlement of The Valley as the capital. The economy is tourism — villas and boutique resorts — plus offshore financial services, fishing, and the domain-name windfall; taxes are light, and a 3 per cent Interim Stabilisation Levy brought in in 2011 was the island's first form of income tax.

Nearly everything is imported, including much of the water, which is desalinated, and electricity is costly. Daily life is car-dependent, and crime is low. The pace is deliberately slow, and much of the visitor economy is built around doing very little in comfortable surroundings.

Anguilla has a reputation as a Caribbean food destination out of proportion to its size. Spiny lobster, conch — stewed, or in a thick "conch soup" — grilled and stewed fish, pigeon peas and rice, salt cod, conch fritters, and goat are the local base, served both at simple beach shacks and at accomplished restaurants.

Beach barbecue shacks and roadside grills across the island do ribs, chicken, and just-landed fish, often with a band and a rum punch. Local rum and a sunset at a beach bar are close to a national institution.

The beaches are the point. Shoal Bay East, with its long sweep of powder sand and clear shallows, is the most famous; Rendezvous Bay, Meads Bay, Maundays Bay, and the tiny Little Bay are others. Offshore, day trips run to Sandy Island, Prickly Pear, and Scilly Cay for snorkelling and near-empty sand.

The reefs make for easy diving and snorkelling. On land, the Anguilla National Museum, which took over the Heritage Collection in 2024, tells the island's story, the rock ledges at Big Spring hold more than 100 Amerindian petroglyphs cut between about AD 600 and 1200, and the salt pond at Sandy Ground recalls the old industry. The Dune Preserve, the beach bar of the musician Bankie Banx, hosts the Moonsplash festival, and a boat-race day is the best way to see the island at full tilt.