Turks and Caicos Islands

The islands were home to the Lucayan (Taíno) people until Spanish slave raids emptied them by the 1520s. Bermudian salt rakers settled Grand Turk and Salt Cay from the 1680s, and after the American Revolution Loyalist planters arrived on the Caicos islands with enslaved Africans to grow cotton, then turned to salt. For two centuries "white gold", raked by hand from shallow ponds, was the entire economy.

Administered at different times with the Bahamas and then Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos became a separate British colony in 1962 when Jamaica gained independence. The salt industry collapsed soon after, leaving the islands very poor and dependent on Britain. An airport on Providenciales and the opening of a Club Med in the 1980s began the tourism era that has reshaped the territory.

In 2009 the United Kingdom suspended the elected government over serious corruption and ruled directly until fresh elections in 2012. Hurricanes Irma and Maria caused heavy damage in 2017. Today the economy is high-end tourism and offshore finance, the population is growing fast with workers from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines, and there is no income tax.

Islanders with roots in the territory are known as "Belongers", an English-speaking, Christian people descended from enslaved Africans and the salt-raking communities. Ripsaw music — a rhythm scraped on a carpenter's handsaw — is the national sound, played by string bands at festivals and at the Boxing Day Maskanoo parade. Sloop building and model-sloop racing survive on Middle Caicos, and the queen conch is woven through island identity, celebrated each November at the Conch Festival.

The resident population is small and heavily outnumbered by tourists and by migrant workers, especially the large Haitian community, whose status and periodic immigration crackdowns are a recurring local issue. Society is conservative and church-centred, and the wild donkeys and the endangered rock iguana are unofficial island emblems.

Around 46,000 people live in the Turks and Caicos, most on Providenciales ("Provo"), the tourism and business island; Cockburn Town on Grand Turk is a tiny capital. The economy is overwhelmingly tourism — resorts, private villas, and a cruise pier on Grand Turk — supplemented by offshore financial services.

There is no income tax; the cost of living is very high because nearly everything is imported; and daily life is car-dependent. Provo has grown rapidly and unevenly, with luxury development along Grace Bay and working settlements inland, while the "family islands" — North, Middle, and South Caicos, Salt Cay — remain small, quiet, and slowly emptying.

Conch is the staple and the symbol: cracked (pounded and fried), as fritters, in a chowder, or raw as a lime-marinated "conch salad" made to order at the shacks. Fresh grouper, snapper, and spiny lobster (in season roughly August to March) round out the seafood, and breakfast is often boiled fish with grits or "peas and grits".

Johnnycake and hominy are traditional sides, and the Haitian community has made griot (fried pork) and rice widely available on Provo. Da Conch Shack on Providenciales is the best-known of the roadside spots. Rum and the local Turk's Head beer are the usual drinks.

Grace Bay Beach on Providenciales is the centrepiece — a long, calm, reef-shielded stretch of white sand regularly rated among the world's best — with the Bight Reef ("Coral Gardens") and Smith's Reef for snorkelling straight off the shore. The turquoise, shallow Chalk Sound, a national park, and the wall dives at West Caicos and Northwest Point are close by.

Grand Turk keeps a small, salt-era capital of Bermudian buildings around Cockburn Town, with the Turks and Caicos National Museum (home to remains of the Molasses Reef wreck), a nineteenth-century lighthouse, and a cruise centre. Middle Caicos has the territory's grandest scenery: the Conch Bar Caves and the cliffs and beach at Mudjin Harbour. North Caicos has flamingo ponds and the ruins of Wade's Green plantation.

The Columbus Passage between the Turks and Caicos banks is a migration route for humpback whales from January to April, watched from Salt Cay and Grand Turk, and Long Bay on Provo is a leading kiteboarding beach.