City Information

Barely 35 square miles in size, and rising to a highest point of just over two hundred feet, Anguilla has an interior that is dry, dusty and covered in scrubby vegetation. However, this fact is largely ignored by an increasing stream of visitors who beat their way here for the glorious turquoise waters and truly stunning beaches. Some of these, particularly Rendezvous Bay in the southwest and Shoal Bay in the northeast, are among the finest in the Caribbean.
Long ignored by tourists, tiny Anguilla has benefited from careful study of the planning mistakes that have badly damaged neighbours like St Martin/St Maarten, where runaway development has led to rising crime and serious social problems. By contrast, Anguilla has eschewed large-scale tourist complexes, successfully aiming for top-quality, high-end development with relatively limited impact on the island's scarce resources. As a result, the island feels very safe, welcoming and relaxed. If you're happy with beach wandering, watersports and plenty of good restaurants, Anguilla is hard to beat.

Like other Caribbean islands Anguilla is a year-round destination; however, the best time to visit is between mid-December and mid-April when rainfall is low and the heat is tempered by cooling trade winds.

Anguilla is centred around its modest capital, The Valley, from which roads head both east and west to the island's fine beaches and natural attractions, chief among them shimmering Shoal Bay East and Rendezvous Bay. There are no towns or villages as such on the island, and the closest thing you'll find are the small clusters of houses found in areas such as Sandy Ground and Island Harbour.

Amerindians are thought to have settled in Anguilla around 1500 BC, living in small settlements dotted around the island. Major remains have been found at twenty sites including the Fountain, the island's only natural spring, near Shoal Bay. Columbus missed the island on his trips to the New World in the 1490s, but Spanish explorers who passed by shortly afterwards named the island Anguilla (Spanish for eel) for its long thin shape.

The first Europeans to establish a permanent base here were the British, who arrived in 1650 and began growing tobacco and cotton, and raising livestock with a small number of imported slaves. Short on rainfall, and without the size or the quality of soil to enable its plantations to compete with nearby islands, Anguilla never really flourished. Those who could afford to leave made off for more prosperous islands.

For centuries the islanders who remained managed on little more than subsistence farming and fishing. Furthermore, they developed a reputation for boat building and seamanship, running boats that exported salt and fish and carried local men off for seasonal work in the sugar fields of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic) and the oil refineries of Aruba and Curaçao.

After World War II, with its major Caribbean colonies pressing for independence, Britain showed little interest in continuing to maintain Anguilla. For convenience, it was decided in the 1960s that the island should be administered alongside nearby St Kitts and Nevis, and a union of the islands was put in place. Anguillans, who regarded the politicians on St Kitts as arrogant and bullying, were outraged and demonstrated against the union. They declared independence, sending home the policemen installed by St Kitts and calling in a Harvard law professor to draft a national constitution.

Showing a wholly disproportionate reaction, British troops decided to invade and crush "The Rebellion". In March 1969 a crack battalion of over three hundred stormed ashore, only to be met by local citizens waving flags and demanding to be put back directly under British rule. Not a shot was fired, and the event was dubbed Britain's Bay of Piglets.

Shame-faced, Britain resumed direct responsibility for Anguilla, which it has maintained to this day, with the island run by an elected government but the British-appointed Governor in charge of matters of defence and foreign policy. Tourism took off in the 1980s, when day-trippers from nearby St Martin/St Maarten began to arrive in droves. Today the industry drives the local economy, leaving fewer and fewer of its nearly 10,000 inhabitants dependent on the trade in lobster and fish that sustained previous generations.