Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda are two low islands in the north-eastern Caribbean, with the uninhabited rock of Redonda to the south-west. Antigua’s shore is a ragged edge of bays and coves, a beach tucked into almost every one, and the dry climate led planters to build windmills to crush cane and cisterns to catch rain. English Harbour sheltered warships from hurricanes. Barbuda is flat coral edged with pink-tinged sand, and frigatebirds nest by the thousand in Codrington Lagoon.

Amerindian farmers lived here long before Columbus sighted Antigua in 1493 and named it after an image of the Virgin in Seville Cathedral. English settlers came from St Kitts in 1632 and planted sugar; the Codrington family built Betty’s Hope and leased Barbuda to raise food and livestock. A planned uprising of the enslaved was crushed in 1736. In 1834 Antigua ended slavery outright, without the apprenticeship imposed elsewhere, and independence followed in November 1981 under Vere Cornwall Bird.

Antigua gave West Indies cricket Viv Richards, Curtly Ambrose and Richie Richardson, and Brian Lara twice broke the Test batting record at the Recreation Ground. Fungee and pepperpot, cornmeal with a thick stew of greens and meat, counts as the national dish; the sweet black pineapple grows in the south-west. Carnival, at the turn of July and August, celebrates emancipation, and Jamaica Kincaid wrote of the island in A Small Place. Tourism and yachting carry the economy, above all during Antigua Sailing Week.