Belize

Belize faces the Caribbean behind a coral barrier reef that runs almost the length of its coast, sheltering hundreds of cays such as Ambergris Caye and Caye Caulker. At Lighthouse Reef the Great Blue Hole drops into a sunken cave, explored by Jacques Cousteau in 1971. Inland, the north is flat sugar country, while the Maya Mountains in the south shelter the jaguars of the Cockscomb Basin. Hurricane Hattie battered Belize City, the old colonial port, in October 1961.

Caracol, Lamanai and Xunantunich were Maya cities, and Caracol’s rulers defeated Tikal in AD 562. From the seventeenth century British woodcutters, the Baymen, cut logwood and mahogany with enslaved African labour; in September 1798 they beat off a Spanish fleet at St George’s Caye. The colony of British Honduras was proclaimed in 1862. Garifuna people came ashore at Dangriga in 1832, refugees fled south from the Caste War in Yucatán, and Mennonites arrived from Mexico in 1958. Belize became independent in September 1981.

Kriol is spoken almost everywhere, beside Spanish, Garifuna, Maya languages and Mennonite Low German. Pen Cayetano turned the Garifuna punta into punta rock in the late 1970s. Rice and beans simmered with coconut milk make the everyday plate, and fry jacks start the morning. Cane from Orange Walk and Corozal, citrus concentrate from the Stann Creek valley, bananas and farmed shrimp fill out the economy, and divers and visitors to Maya ruins bring tourist money.