Montserrat

Montserrat is a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, one of the Leeward Islands in the northern Lesser Antilles. The government works from Brades in the north of the island, while Plymouth remains the official capital.

People of the Archaic culture lived in the Centre Hills between 2000 and 500 BC, and the Carib name for it is thought to have been Alliouagana. Christopher Columbus sailed past in 1493 and named it after the Virgin of Montserrat, whose monastery stands near Barcelona. Irish settlers came from Saint Kitts in 1632, and their descendants and the green coast gave it the nickname ‘Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’. France held the island briefly in the 1660s and again from 1782 until the Treaty of Paris returned it to Britain in 1783, and planters grew sugar.

Since 1985 St Patrick's Day has been a ten-day public holiday of music and island culture. From 1869 the Montserrat Company of the Sturge family grew Key limes and shipped lime juice to England. The island belonged to the British Leeward Islands colony from 1871 to 1958 and to the West Indies Federation until 1962, and William Henry Bramble served as its first chief minister from 1960. In 1979 the Beatles producer George Martin opened AIR Studios Montserrat, and musicians came to the island to record.

The Soufrière Hills volcano has been active since 18 July 1995, and the Montserrat Volcano Observatory watches it. Princess Anne opened a new airport in the north in 2005, and work on a port and town at Little Bay began in 2022. The national bird, the Montserrat oriole, lives nowhere else, and the island shares the frog known as the mountain chicken only with Dominica.