Dominica

Dominica was the last Caribbean island Europeans managed to hold onto, because its steep, forested terrain and its Kalinago (Island Carib) inhabitants made settlement so difficult. The Kalinago, who had displaced earlier peoples, fought off Spanish and then French and British attempts for well over a century, and a community of their descendants survives on the island's east coast — the only substantial Indigenous population left in the eastern Caribbean.

France and Britain both claimed and fought over the island in the eighteenth century, running coffee and sugar estates worked by enslaved Africans; Britain took final control in 1763. Enslaved people who escaped into the mountains formed "Maroon" communities that resisted for decades.

Dominica moved from a British colony to internal self-government and then to full independence in 1978, as a republic within the Commonwealth. Hurricane David in 1979 and, far worse, Hurricane Maria in 2017 — which struck as a Category 5 and stripped the island's forests bare — have repeatedly set back its development. The country now markets itself as the world's first "climate-resilient nation" and runs a citizenship-by-investment programme to fund reconstruction.

Dominica's culture is Afro-Caribbean and Creole, with a strong French-Catholic layer from the colonial back-and-forth and a distinct Kalinago thread. Kwéyòl, the French-based creole, is widely spoken, and there is a movement to keep it and the traditional bélé drumming and dance, the jing ping accordion-and-boom-boom music, and masquerade alive.

The Kalinago Territory, a stretch of the east coast held communally, is home to a few thousand people who maintain canoe-building, basketry woven from larouma reed, cassava bread, and their own council and chief. Bush medicine — the use of forest plants for healing — is still widely practised across the island.

Christianity, mostly Catholic, is central to community life, and the annual World Creole Music Festival, held around Independence in late October alongside "Creole in the Park" and Jounen Kwéyòl, is the cultural high point of the year.

Roughly a quarter of the island's roughly 70,000 people live in or near Roseau, the small capital on the southwest coast; Portsmouth in the north is the second town. The rest of the population is spread through farming villages along the coasts and in the valleys.

The economy rests on agriculture — bananas historically, now more diverse with root crops, citrus, coffee, cocoa, and bay oil — along with a growing eco- and adventure-tourism sector, geothermal energy development, and the passport programme. Emigration, especially to the other islands, the UK, and the US, is long-standing, and remittances matter.

Life is rural, church-centred, and closely tied to the land and the weather. Rebuilding stronger after Maria — hurricane-proof roofs, buried power lines — has been a national project.

Dominican cooking is Creole and rooted in what the island grows. The national dish is "mountain chicken" — actually the legs of a large native frog, the crapaud — though hunting has been suspended for years to protect the species, so it is rarely served. In practice the everyday food is fish, chicken, and pork with "provisions": dasheen, yam, green banana, breadfruit, and plantain.

Callaloo soup (dasheen leaves), sancocho-style broths, saltfish with bakes, and bouyon, a hearty one-pot soup, are staples, along with the Kalinago cassava bread (kasav) and farine. Fresh river crayfish and coconut in many forms appear widely.

Local drinks include cocoa tea, bush teas, fresh juices, sea moss, and rum — Dominica's own distilleries produce it, and "bush rum" infused with herbs and roots is a village tradition. Kubuli is the local beer.

Dominica is a hiking and nature destination rather than a beach one. Morne Trois Pitons National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contains the Boiling Lake — a flooded fumarole, the second-largest of its kind in the world, reached by a strenuous guided day hike past the steaming Valley of Desolation — along with the Trafalgar Falls, the Emerald Pool, and Titou Gorge.

The 184-kilometre Waitukubuli National Trail runs the length of the island in fourteen segments through rainforest, ridges, and villages. Elsewhere, the Indian River near Portsmouth is a calm rowboat trip through swamp forest, and Cabrits National Park protects a restored Georgian garrison, Fort Shirley, on a headland.

Underwater, Dominica has some of the best diving in the region — dramatic drop-offs, pinnacles, and the champagne-bubble vents of Champagne Reef — and it is one of the few places where you can reliably swim near resident sperm whales. The Kalinago Territory on the wild windward coast offers a window into Indigenous Caribbean life.