Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Kitts and Nevis is a federation of two islands in the Leeward Islands of the eastern Caribbean. Basseterre on Saint Kitts is the capital and main port, and Nevis lies about 3 km (2 mi) to the southeast across a channel called the Narrows.

Archaic hunter-gatherers reached the islands as early as 3000 BCE, followed around 100 BCE by Saladoid farmers and potters from the Orinoco region and around 1300 CE by the Kalinago, who called Saint Kitts Liamuiga and Nevis Oualie. Columbus sighted the islands in 1493. Thomas Warner founded the first English settlement at Old Road Town in 1623, the French arrived in 1625, and the two divided Saint Kitts between them; as the site of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean, it is called the Mother Colony of the West Indies.

Sugar estates spread, and by the end of the 1700s Saint Kitts was the richest British colony in the Caribbean per head. Alexander Hamilton, later the first United States secretary of the Treasury, was born on Nevis in 1755 or 1757. The islands joined Anguilla in one colony, belonged to the West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962, and in 1967, the year Anguilla broke away, won self-government in its internal affairs as a state associated with Britain. Independence came on 19 September 1983, the most recent of any British territory in the Caribbean.

The federation keeps the British monarch as head of state. The sugar industry, long kept alive by subsidies, closed completely in 2005, and tourism took its place, with cruise ships calling at Basseterre. Brimstone Hill Fortress, a national park since 1985, joined the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999. The name Nevis comes from the Spanish for Our Lady of the Snows, probably after the clouds that wrap Nevis Peak.