Saint Lucia

The Kalinago inhabited the island, which France and Britain then fought over fourteen times — earning the nickname "the Helen of the West", after Helen of Troy — before Britain secured it in 1814 under the Treaty of Paris. A sugar and later banana plantation economy was worked by enslaved Africans until emancipation in 1834, and then by indentured labour.

Saint Lucia joined the short-lived West Indies Federation of 1958–62, became one of the West Indies Associated States with internal self-government in 1967, and gained independence on 22 February 1979. Politics has since alternated between the Saint Lucia Labour Party and the United Workers Party. From a population of under 200,000, the island has produced two Nobel laureates, both born in Castries — the economist Sir Arthur Lewis, who shared the economics prize in 1979, and the poet Derek Walcott, who won for literature in 1992 — a fact of great national pride.

Bananas were the mainstay of the economy until competition from South American growers cut the industry back, and tourism, along with some offshore finance and a citizenship-by-investment programme running since 2015, has taken over.

Saint Lucian culture blends African, French, and British inheritances. It is strongly Roman Catholic, a French legacy, and Kwéyòl — the French-based creole — is the everyday language of most people, celebrated on the last Sunday of October as Jounen Kwéyòl, held every year since 1984, with food, dress, and music in villages across the island.

The flower societies of La Rose, whose festival falls on 30 August, and La Marguerite, on 17 October, with their friendly rivalry, are a distinctive tradition, alongside string-band music, calypso and soca, and a summer Carnival. Cricket is the most popular sport, with football widely played too, and the island prides itself on having produced more Nobel laureates for its size than any other sovereign country.

Most Saint Lucians live in and around Castries in the north and along the west coast, with the interior mountainous and forested. Tourism dominates the economy — cruise calls and stay-over resorts, with the north around Rodney Bay for nightlife and Soufrière and Marigot Bay for scenery and luxury — supplemented by small-scale agriculture, light manufacturing, and finance.

High public debt, hurricane vulnerability, and youth unemployment are the standing challenges, and there have been attempts to bring in geothermal and wind energy to cut reliance on imported fuel.

Saint Lucian cooking is Creole. The national dish is green figs (green bananas) and saltfish, and bouyon, a thick red-bean one-pot of meat, ground provisions, and vegetables, is the Saturday standard. Callaloo soup, accra (saltfish fritters), green fig salad, breadfruit and saltfish, and bakes (fried bread) round out the table.

Cocoa is grown on the island, and cocoa tea — a spiced hot breakfast drink — along with juices of local fruit and lime squash, is common, with Piton, the pilsner brewed on the island since 1992, and rum for the evening.

The Pitons, the twin volcanic plugs rising from the sea near Soufrière — Gros Piton at 798 metres and Petit Piton at 743 — are the national emblem and a World Heritage Site, with Gros Piton the easier of the two to climb on a guided tour. Soufrière also has the Sulphur Springs, a geothermal field of steam vents and boiling mud pits inside a long-collapsed crater, known as "the world's only drive-in volcano", along with botanical gardens and waterfalls and, offshore, diving and snorkelling.

Marigot Bay, a deep inlet hemmed in on three sides by steep forested hills, and the beach and coastal trails at Anse Chastanet are among the most photographed spots on the west coast. In the north, Rodney Bay and Reduit Beach — the island's most popular beach, with a strip of restaurants and clubs behind it — are the resort and nightlife hub, and Pigeon Island, a national landmark since 1992 and joined to the mainland by a causeway in 1972, keeps the 18th-century British forts, including Fort Rodney, from which the navy watched French Martinique. The Atlantic east coast is wilder, with the fishing villages of the Dennery district.