Cayman Islands

Columbus sighted the islands in 1503 and called them Las Tortugas for the sea turtles; the name that stuck, "Caimanas", came from a word for the crocodilians once found here. No people lived here before the Europeans, and for two centuries the islands drew only turtle hunters, buccaneers, deserters from Cromwell's army in Jamaica, and the survivors of shipwrecks on the reefs. A permanent English-speaking population dates from the 1730s, and the first royal land grant by the governor of Jamaica in 1734 brought settlement and enslaved Africans; the islands were administered as a dependency of Jamaica.

Local legend holds that George III granted the Caymans freedom from taxation after islanders rescued the crews of a wrecked convoy, the "Wreck of the Ten Sail", on 8 February 1794 — the reward is legend rather than record, though the absence of direct taxes is very real. When Jamaica became independent in 1962 the Cayman Islands chose to remain a British territory.

From the 1960s the islands built themselves into a tax-neutral offshore financial centre, and about 100,000 companies are now registered here, more than the resident population, alongside a large tourism industry of cruise calls and stopover visitors. Hurricane Ivan submerged nearly all of Grand Cayman in September 2004; a major rebuilding programme had the island's infrastructure almost back to its pre-hurricane condition within two years, and the territory remains the wealthiest in the Caribbean by income per head.

Caymanian identity is English-speaking, Christian, and rooted in the sea: Caymanians long made their living from turtling and the sea, and seafaring, thrift, and church still shape the culture. Traditional crafts include rope made from the silver thatch palm, the national tree, and the old wooden catboat and island cooking are points of pride, with festivals such as Pirates Week and Batabano celebrating local culture.

More than half the workforce is now foreign nationals — Jamaican, Filipino, Honduran, British, American, Canadian — on work permits tied to their employer, and the friction between the islands' welcoming image and real tensions over immigration, housing, and cost of living is a constant theme. Society is socially conservative and law-and-order minded, though same-sex civil partnerships were introduced in 2020 after a court battle, and the Privy Council upheld the law in 2025.

About 90,000 people live across the three islands, the great majority on Grand Cayman, where George Town is the capital and financial hub. There is no income, capital-gains, or corporation tax; government revenue comes from import duties, company and work-permit fees, and tourism.

The cost of living is very high, housing and rent especially so, and daily life is car-dependent, air-conditioned, and closely tied to the finance and tourism calendars. Cayman Brac, with its limestone bluff, and tiny Little Cayman, with a couple of hundred residents and world-famous diving, are far quieter and more rural than Grand Cayman.

Caymanian cooking centres on the sea: conch (stewed, or as fritters), fresh mahi-mahi, wahoo, and snapper, fish and seafood cooked in coconut milk, and turtle stew, still eaten and now supplied by a farm on Grand Cayman, a practice that draws criticism abroad. Sides run to rice and peas, cassava and breadfruit, and sweet, dense "heavy cake".

Jamaican jerk and patties are everywhere given the size of the Jamaican community, and the invasive lionfish now appears on menus as a conservation measure. Local rum and beer from the Cayman Islands Brewery, opened in 2007, are the usual drinks, and Stingray City — wading with wild southern stingrays on a sandbar in the North Sound — is as much a food story as a wildlife one, the rays long fed by fishermen cleaning their catch there.

Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman is the headline — a long, calm, west-facing strip of coral sand lined with resorts. Offshore, the diving is exceptional: the sheer drop-offs and coral of the walls, the USS Kittiwake, sunk off Seven Mile Beach as an artificial reef in 2011, and, off Little Cayman, the celebrated Bloody Bay Wall, which falls away from six metres to the abyss.

Stingray City and its shallow sandbars draw boat trips into the North Sound; Rum Point on the quieter north coast has calm swimming and a bioluminescent bay; and the Mastic Trail crosses old forest through the middle of the island. The Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park protects native dry forest and runs the recovery programme for the endemic blue iguana, brought back from the edge of extinction.

Novelty stops include "Hell", a field of jagged black limestone with its own post office, and the Cayman Turtle Centre. Cayman Brac offers bluff-top trails and caves, and Little Cayman has the Booby Pond nature reserve and long, almost empty beaches.