British Virgin Islands

Amerindian peoples — Arawak, then Kalinago — lived here before Columbus passed in 1493 and named the islands for Saint Ursula and her legendary 11,000 virgins. Dutch and then English planters settled from the seventeenth century, growing sugar and cotton with enslaved African labour. After emancipation in 1834 the plantations failed and most planters left, and the freed population lived by small-scale farming and fishing — a pattern that still shapes the BVI.

Governed as part of the Leeward Islands and then as a separate colony from 1960, the territory turned to new industries from the 1960s: upmarket tourism, led by Laurance Rockefeller's Little Dix Bay, and yacht chartering out of Tortola. Later the BVI became one of the world's largest offshore incorporation centres, and hundreds of thousands of "BVI companies" now generate the bulk of government revenue.

Hurricane Irma devastated the islands in September 2017. In 2022, after the elected premier was arrested in the United States on drug-trafficking charges — he was convicted in 2024 — a UK-appointed commission of inquiry recommended that the constitution be suspended and direct rule restored; London held off pending governance reforms, and elected government has continued.

BVI "Belonger" identity is English-speaking, Christian — Methodism runs deep — and descended from enslaved Africans and the post-emancipation smallholders. Fungi (or "scratch") bands, using calabash gourd, washboard, bongos and ukulele, provide the traditional music, and the August Festival is the territory's emancipation carnival, held over three days from the first Monday in August and marking the end of slavery on 1 August 1834.

Boat-building and sloop racing are part of the heritage, and islanders are keen to distinguish themselves from the more Americanised US Virgin Islands to the west. It is a small, conservative resident community living alongside a large transient world of yacht crews, charter guests, and finance professionals.

Around 30,000 people live in the BVI, most on Tortola, where Road Town is the capital; Virgin Gorda, Anegada, and Jost Van Dyke are the other main inhabited islands. The economy rests on financial services and on tourism — yacht charter, villas, and day trips — with no income tax and a high cost of living.

A large share of the workforce holds permits and comes from across the eastern Caribbean. Daily life is car-dependent, tied to the ferry timetable, and, since 2017, still shaped by the long recovery from Irma, which flattened much of the building stock and infrastructure.

The food is Caribbean and sea-focused: conch, fresh fish, "fish and fungi" (with a cornmeal-and-okra polenta), roti, salt-fish pates, callaloo, and johnnycake. Anegada supplies much of the territory's fresh fish and lobster, and the lobster is the thing to eat on the island.

Rum is the local spirit, and the Painkiller cocktail — rum with pineapple juice, orange juice and cream of coconut, shaken and dusted with fresh nutmeg — was created in the 1970s at the Soggy Dollar Bar at White Bay on Jost Van Dyke.

The Baths on Virgin Gorda are the signature sight: a shoreline maze of house-sized granite boulders forming caves, tunnels, and pools that you scramble and wade through to reach a hidden beach. But the main attraction is the sailing — the sheltered Sir Francis Drake Channel, dotted with easy anchorages, is why the BVI became a chartering centre.

Jost Van Dyke is famous for its beach bars — White Bay, the Soggy Dollar, and Foxy's — and the Bubbly Pool. Anegada, the only coral island, sits inside a large reef with flamingos, rock iguanas, huge empty beaches, and the lobster. The wreck of the RMS Rhone, sunk in an 1867 hurricane off Salt Island, is one of the Caribbean's premier dive sites.

Virgin Gorda also offers the yachting hub of North Sound, with the Bitter End at its eastern edge, and Tortola has Cane Garden Bay, the forested heights of Mount Sage, and Road Town's waterfront and small museum. Norman Island, said to be an inspiration for Treasure Island, has caves to snorkel.