Sint Maarten

The island was home to Arawak and later Carib peoples; Columbus sighted it in 1493 and named it for Saint Martin. Spain held it loosely, and after Spanish withdrawal in 1648 the Dutch and French agreed to share it in the Treaty of Concordia — by legend settled by a walking contest, in practice by negotiation — making Saint Martin/Sint Maarten the smallest land mass in the world divided between two sovereign states, and the border has shifted only slightly since.

Both sides ran salt pans and small sugar and cotton plantations worked by enslaved Africans; slavery was abolished on the French side in 1848 and the Dutch side in 1863. The island stayed poor and thinly populated into the twentieth century.

Tourism changed everything from the 1950s and 60s: duty-free shopping, casinos, an international airport, and cruise ships turned Sint Maarten into one of the Caribbean's busiest destinations and drew a large migrant workforce from across the region. Within the Netherlands Antilles it pushed for autonomy, and when the Antilles were dissolved in 2010 Sint Maarten became a self-governing country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In September 2017 Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 storm, hit the island head-on, killing several people, wrecking the airport and much of the building stock, and triggering looting; a Dutch-funded reconstruction programme, with strings attached, has driven a slow recovery and recurring friction with The Hague.

Sint Maarten's culture is a Caribbean melting pot with an unusual twist: because the tourism boom drew workers from across the region, the everyday language is English rather than Dutch or French, and the population is a mix of "SXM-born" families and communities from Dominica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, India, and elsewhere.

Carnival is the biggest cultural event on each side — the Dutch side after Easter, the French side before Lent — with calypso and soca competitions, costumed troupes, and street "jump-ups". Ponum dance, string bands, and the guavaberry liqueur that features in Christmas songs are older island traditions.

Religion is mostly Christian across many denominations, and family, church, the neighbourhood, and Carnival groups organise social life. The island's identity is strongly bound up with its unique dual status, marked each 11 November on Sint Maarten Day, celebrated on both sides.

Around 44,000 people live on the Dutch side and about 32,000 on the French side, almost all within a short drive of each other on a very small island. As Dutch or French nationals, many islanders hold EU citizenship and move to Europe for study and work.

The economy is overwhelmingly tourism — cruise calls at Point Blanche, one of the busiest cruise ports in the Caribbean, plus stopover visitors, yachting in the huge Simpson Bay Lagoon, and duty-free retail — supplemented by offshore finance. This leaves the island highly exposed to shocks, as the pandemic and Irma both showed, and the cost of living, imported almost entirely, is high.

Daily life is bilingual or multilingual, car-dependent, and closely tied to the cruise and flight schedules, the lagoon, and the beaches.

Sint Maarten's food is pan-Caribbean with strong French, Dutch, Indian, and Indonesian influences, and the island bills itself as a culinary capital of the region. Callaloo soup, stewed conch, saltfish, curried goat, johnnycakes, and Creole-spiced snapper are the local base, with guavaberry — a tart wild fruit — made into a Christmas liqueur that is the island's own.

The roadside lolos of Grand Case, on the French side, grill ribs, chicken, snapper, and lobster over oil-drum barbecues and are an institution, while Grand Case's small strip of bistros gives the French half a reputation for fine dining. On the Dutch side, Philipsburg and Simpson Bay run from Dutch bar snacks (bitterballen, frikandel) to Indian roti shops and international resort restaurants.

Local rums, Carib and Presidente beers, and fresh tropical juices are the usual drinks, along with the guavaberry colada.

Maho Beach, at the end of the airport runway, is the island's odd celebrity: a small beach where arriving jets pass just overhead and departing ones blast sand and spray across it. Philipsburg, the Dutch capital, has the long Great Bay boardwalk, Front Street's duty-free shops, and Fort Amsterdam on the headland, while quieter Dutch-side beaches include Mullet Bay, Cupecoy, and Little Bay.

The huge, sheltered Simpson Bay Lagoon, shared by both nations, is one of the largest inland lagoons in the Caribbean and a superyacht and watersports centre, crossed by opening bridges.

The French half of the island — Orient Bay and the other classic beaches, the harbour town of Marigot, hilltop Fort Louis, Pic Paradis, and the Grand Case restaurant strip — is covered on the Saint-Martin page; there is no border crossing between the two sides, so all of it is within easy reach of a Dutch-side base.