Haiti

Haiti’s name comes from a Taíno word for a mountainous land, and almost nowhere in the country is out of sight of a ridge. It covers the western third of Hispaniola, its two long peninsulas reaching round the Gulf of Gonâve like the claws of a crab. The Artibonite waters a valley of rice fields, and Tortuga, off the north coast, was once a base for buccaneers. The island sits in the track of Atlantic hurricanes.

Columbus’s flagship ran aground off the northern coast in December 1492. Under French rule, Saint-Domingue, worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, became the richest sugar and coffee colony in the Caribbean. The enslaved rose in August 1791; Toussaint Louverture led the struggle until the French seized him, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence in January 1804, founding the first state born of a slave revolt. France later exacted a heavy indemnity for recognition. American forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and the Duvaliers ruled from 1957 to 1986.

Vodou, which grew from West African faiths on the plantations, is practised alongside Catholicism, and its spirits, the lwa, fill paintings, songs and the rara bands of Easter. On New Year’s Day families eat soup joumou, a pumpkin soup once denied to the enslaved, to mark independence. Metalworkers at Croix-des-Bouquets cut sculptures from flattened oil drums. Money from Haitians abroad sustains many families, alongside clothing sewn for the American market, mangoes, coffee and vetiver oil for French perfumers.