Antigua and Barbuda

The islands were settled first by Arawak and later Kalinago (Carib) peoples. Columbus sighted Antigua in 1493 and named it after a church in Seville. 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 largest. Barbuda was leased to the same family as a supply island.

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, online gaming, 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 under 100,000 people produced Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Andy Roberts, 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 roughly 1,500 residents in the single village of Codrington, is far quieter and more self-reliant, living on fishing, lobster, and a trickle of tourism.

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. Ties to relatives in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada are close, and remittances and returning retirees are part of the local economy.

Water and electricity can be unreliable — Antigua is a dry island and depends heavily on desalination — and the hurricane season is a yearly reckoning, with 2017's Irma still a fresh memory on Barbuda, which it left uninhabitable for months.

The national dish is fungie and pepperpot: fungie is a firm cornmeal-and-okra polenta, cut into rounds, and pepperpot here is a long-simmered stew of salt meat, greens (often spinach or callaloo), squash, and dumplings. Saltfish, often with antguan seasoned rice or with chop-up (mashed eggplant, okra, and spinach), is a common breakfast.

Local specialities include ducana, a sweet dumpling of grated sweet potato and coconut boiled in a leaf; seasoned rice with pigeon peas; conch; goat water (a spiced goat stew); and the small, intensely sweet "Antigua Black" pineapple grown in the southwest. On Barbuda the prized foods are spiny lobster and venison from the island's feral deer.

Rum is the national drink — English Harbour and Cavalier are distilled on Antigua — 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 — the tourist board's claim of 365, one for each day, is not far off. Half Moon Bay on the Atlantic side, Darkwood and Ffryes on the calmer southwest, and Dickenson Bay and Runaway Bay in the northwest are among the best known, and few are built up. Devil's Bridge, a natural limestone arch on the northeast coast, 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, and to Stingray City. Barbuda's Codrington Lagoon holds one of the largest colonies of magnificent frigatebirds in the world, best seen by small boat, and the island's western shore is a nearly unbroken stretch of pink-tinged sand. The uninhabited island of Redonda, a former guano rock, has become a notable seabird and reptile rewilding success.