The Bay Islands & the Caribbean East

Pech and other Chibchan-speaking peoples lived along the eastern coast and rivers, and the Mosquitia forest holds the remains of large pre-Columbian settlements, some mapped only since aerial laser surveys in the 2010s. In 1502, on his fourth voyage, Christopher Columbus reached Guanaja and then landed on the mainland near present-day Trujillo. The Spanish founded Trujillo in 1525, one of their first towns on the Central American mainland, and built the fortress of Santa Bárbara to defend it.

For the next three centuries the east was contested. English, Dutch and French pirates used the Bay Islands as bases, and Britain built alliances with the Miskito, whose kings ruled the coast under British protection. In 1797 the British deported several thousand Garífuna from St Vincent to Roatán, and from there they spread to Trujillo and the mainland coast. In the 1830s settlers from the Cayman Islands arrived on the islands, which Britain ceded to Honduras only in 1859. In 1860 the American filibuster William Walker, who had seized power in Nicaragua, was captured and executed in Trujillo, where his grave lies.

In the twentieth century banana and palm companies worked the Aguán valley, and ranchers pushed into Olancho's forests. Since the early 2000s the Bajo Aguán has seen a long, deadly conflict between peasant cooperatives and palm-oil companies over land. On Roatán, the private economic zone of Próspera was set up under a 2013 constitutional amendment allowing such zones. The zone law was repealed in 2022 and the Supreme Court declared the zones unconstitutional in 2024; Próspera continues to operate and has brought a US$10.7 billion arbitration claim against Honduras.

The Bay Islands are culturally Caribbean. Islanders of British and Cayman descent speak an English creole, belong to Protestant churches, and until recent decades looked to the sea rather than the mainland; Spanish-speaking Hondurans from the mainland now form a large part of the population. Punta Gorda on Roatán is the oldest Garífuna community in Honduras and celebrates the landing of 1797 every April.

Along the mainland coast, Garífuna villages around Trujillo — Santa Fe, San Antonio and Guadalupe among them — keep their language, drumming and dances. La Mosquitia is home to the Miskito, the largest Indigenous group of the east, with their own language and Moravian churches, alongside the Pech and Tawahka, small peoples of the river forests, and Garífuna villages on the coast. Many Miskito men work as lobster divers, often at great risk.

Olancho is the Honduran frontier: a land of ranches, rodeos and horsemen, with a reputation for independence and settling disputes personally. The former president Manuel Zelaya is an Olancho rancher, and the town fairs of Juticalpa and Catacamas are among the liveliest in the interior.

The Bay Islands have grown fast on tourism. Roatán has most of the people, in Coxen Hole, French Harbour, West End and Oak Ridge, and cruise ships, dive resorts and construction employ many migrants from the mainland. Utila lives largely from diving, and Guanaja from fishing and small-scale tourism. Fresh water, waste and land prices are pressing issues.

On the mainland, Tocoa is the commercial centre of Colón and the Aguán valley's palm-oil industry, and Trujillo is a small port and beach town. La Mosquitia's largest town, Puerto Lempira, has only a few tens of thousands of people; elsewhere, villages depend on fishing, small farms, lobster diving and river transport, and health care is scarce.

Olancho is the largest department in Honduras, larger than El Salvador, and its capital Juticalpa and the town of Catacamas serve a territory of cattle ranches, maize and bean farms and forests. Illegal logging and clearance for pasture have eaten into its forests and into the edges of the Río Plátano reserve.

Island cooking is Caribbean. Coconut runs through everything, from coconut bread to rice and beans cooked in coconut milk. Conch fritters and conch soup, fresh lobster, snapper and grouper are staples, and roadside baleadas are as popular on the islands as on the mainland.

Garífuna villages around Trujillo serve tapado, a seafood soup; hudutu, pounded plantain eaten with fish; and ereba, flat cassava bread. In La Mosquitia, meals centre on fish, cassava, plantain, rice and beans.

Olancho is cattle country, and its signature dish is tapado olanchano, a hearty stew that many Hondurans count the best version of tapado, and Olancho's cheese is eaten with grilled meat across the country.

The Bay Islands sit on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef. On Roatán, West End is the dive and snorkelling village, West Bay has a long beach, and the Roatán Marine Park protects the western reefs, with Punta Gorda and the fishing town of Oak Ridge in the east. Utila, an hour from La Ceiba, has dozens of dive sites, the tiny Utila Cays and a good chance of whale sharks. Guanaja, most of whose people live in the cay town of Bonacca, has quiet reefs and pine-covered hills.

On the mainland, Trujillo has the Fortress of Santa Bárbara, William Walker's grave in the old cemetery, beaches along its bay and the Guaimoreto lagoon, with Garífuna villages nearby.

La Mosquitia is reached by plane and boat. The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protects lowland and mountain rainforest, rivers and coastal lagoons where jaguars, tapirs and manatees live, and boat trips head up the Río Plátano to the village of Las Marías.

In Olancho, the Sierra de Agalta National Park rises to cloud forest, and the Talgua caves near Catacamas, known as the Cave of the Glowing Skulls, held ossuaries of calcite-coated human bones about 3,000 years old.