Antigua and Barbuda

The islands were settled first by Arawak and later Kalinago (Carib) peoples. Columbus sighted Antigua in 1493 and may have named it Santa Maria la Antigua, after an icon in Seville Cathedral. The English settled in 1632 and turned Antigua into a sugar island, clearing the land for plantations worked by enslaved Africans; Betty's Hope, the estate of the Codrington family, was the first large-scale sugar estate on the island. Barbuda was granted to the same family, who held it as absentee owners from 1685 to 1870.

Antigua's deep, hurricane-safe harbours made it strategically valuable, and from the 1720s the Royal Navy built up the dockyard at English Harbour as its main base in the eastern Caribbean. Horatio Nelson was stationed there in the 1780s. When slavery was abolished in 1834, Antigua freed its enslaved population immediately, without the "apprenticeship" transition imposed elsewhere.

Sugar declined over the following century. The islands moved through the Leeward Islands federation and "associated statehood" with Britain in 1967 to full independence on 1 November 1981, as a single country with Barbuda given a degree of local self-government. The economy pivoted to tourism, with offshore finance and a citizenship-by-investment programme alongside it. Politics has been dominated by two parties and, for decades, by the Bird family.

The culture is Afro-Caribbean, shaped by the plantation past and by emancipation. Carnival, held in late July and early August, marks the 1834 abolition of slavery with calypso and soca competitions, steel bands, and costumed "mas" troupes filling the streets of St. John's.

Cricket is close to a national faith. A country of around 106,000 people produced Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Andy Roberts, Sir Richie Richardson, and Sir Curtly Ambrose, and Test matches are played at the stadium named for Richards. Sailing is the other sporting identity: Antigua Sailing Week and the Classic Yacht Regatta draw crews from around the world to English Harbour every spring.

Christianity is central — Anglican, Moravian, and Methodist congregations date to the plantation era — and church, family, and village are the anchors of social life. Barbudans hold a distinct identity, tied to a long tradition of communal rather than private land ownership, which has become a sharp political dispute since Hurricane Irma.

Most people live on Antigua, in and around the capital St. John's or in the villages spread across the island. Tourism and government are the main employers, and the working week bends around the arrival of cruise ships and the flow of stopover visitors. Barbuda, with about 1,600 residents in the single village of Codrington, is far quieter, living mostly on government jobs and tourism, with lobster fishing its main export.

Getting around means the privately run minibuses that ply fixed village routes by day, the market in St. John's for produce and fish, and Sunday given over to church and family meals.

Water and electricity can be unreliable — neither island has enough fresh groundwater for its needs — and the hurricane season is a yearly reckoning. Hurricane Irma destroyed more than 90 per cent of Barbuda's buildings in September 2017 and the whole population was evacuated to Antigua; most residents had returned by February 2019, and Barbuda now holds more people than it did before the storm.

The national dish is fungie and pepperpot: fungie is a firm cornmeal-and-okra polenta, and pepperpot is the long-simmered stew of meat and vegetables eaten with it. Saltfish is a common breakfast, often with seasoned rice or with eggplant, known here as troba. Antiguan butter bread — a soft, buttery loaf baked in small neighbourhood bakeries — is a staple at any hour, usually with cheese.

Local specialities include ducana, a sweet dumpling of grated sweet potato and coconut boiled in a leaf; seasoned rice; conch; souse, a fiery pork soup sold by street vendors at Carnival; and the small "Antigua Black" pineapple, said to be the sweetest variety there is, grown on the southwestern coast. On Barbuda the prized foods are spiny lobster and venison from the island's fallow deer.

Rum is the national drink — the award-winning English Harbour Rum is distilled here — usually taken with fruit juice or in a rum punch, alongside the locally brewed Wadadli beer. Fresh juices from tamarind, sorrel, ginger, and passionfruit are everywhere.

The centrepiece is Nelson's Dockyard National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the only Georgian-era naval dockyard still working anywhere in the world. Its restored stone warehouses and capstans sit around English Harbour, and the ridge above holds the Shirley Heights fortifications, where a Sunday-evening lookout party with a steel band and a view over the harbour is an island institution.

Beaches are the other reason people come — Antigua is reputed to have 365 of them, one for every day of the year. Half Moon Bay on the Atlantic side, Ffryes on the calmer southwest, and Dickenson Bay, with its Runaway Beach, in the northwest are among the best known. Devil's Bridge, a natural rock arch on the Atlantic coast east of Willikies and a national park since 2008, has Atlantic swell blasting through blowholes beside it.

Beyond Antigua, boat trips run to Great Bird Island and the reefs and mangroves of the northeast — Great Bird Island was until recently the only home of the Antiguan racer, one of the world's rarest snakes, which has since been reintroduced to Rabbit, Green and York islands. Barbuda's Codrington Lagoon, the largest saltwater lagoon in the eastern Caribbean, holds the largest magnificent frigatebird colony in the world, best seen by small boat, and the island is known for its Pink Sand Beach. On the uninhabited island of Redonda, a former guano rock, a restoration programme cleared the goats and rats from 2016 and the island's plants and seabirds are coming back.