Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is an island country in the Windward Islands of the eastern Caribbean, south of Martinique and northwest of Barbados. Castries is the capital and largest city, English is the official language, and Saint Lucian French Creole, known as Kwéyòl, is widely spoken.

Arawaks from northern South America settled the island around AD 200 to 400 and called it Louanalao, island of the iguanas, and the Kalinago took control around 800. A globe in the Vatican from 1520 already shows it as Sancta Lucia, after Saint Lucy of Syracuse. The French sailor François le Clerc, known as Jambe de Bois, used Pigeon Island as a base in the late 1550s, and English colonists first landed in 1605. France claimed the island in 1650 and signed a treaty with the Kalinago in 1660.

England and France fought over the island 14 times, which earned it the name Helen of the West, and Britain took full control in 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon. A representative government came in 1924 and universal suffrage in 1951, the island belonged to the West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962, and it became independent on 22 February 1979 with the British monarch as head of state. Two Saint Lucians have won the Nobel Prize: the economist Sir Arthur Lewis in 1979 and the poet Derek Walcott in 1992.

Bananas were the main export for decades, and from the 1990s the economy shifted toward tourism, which is now the largest sector, along with offshore banking. The Pitons, two steep volcanic peaks, are the best-known landmark, and visitors also come for the Sulphur Springs, the Botanical Gardens and Pigeon Island. Saint Lucia belongs to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and the Francophonie.