Turks and Caicos Islands
The Turks and Caicos Islands are a scatter of low limestone islands southeast of the Bahamas, and in 1962 they received an unusual guest. American astronaut John Glenn had just finished three orbits of the Earth. He came down in the ocean nearby and was brought ashore on Grand Turk. That island hosted a United States missile tracking station from 1950 to 1981, and NASA used it in the early days of the American space program.
Today the islands draw a very different crowd, and a very different kind of attention. Their story raises a few questions. Who first crossed these waters, and what became of them? Why did a tiny chain of islands pass from one colonial capital to another for centuries? And what does it take to run a place with so little fresh water and so many visitors?
The word Caicos comes from the Lucayan phrase caya hico, which means string of islands. The Turks Islands owe their name to a cactus, Melocactus intortus, called the Turk's cap. Its red crown looks like the fez once worn by Turks in the late Ottoman Empire.
The two groups sit in the North Atlantic, about 160 kilometres north of Hispaniola and roughly 1000 kilometres from Miami. Between them runs the Turks Island Passage, a channel more than 2200 metres deep. The Caicos Passage separates the Caicos Islands from the nearest Bahamian islands, Mayaguana and Great Inagua. The closest foreign land is Little Inagua, about 48 kilometres from West Caicos.
Blue Hills on Providenciales and Flamingo Hill on East Caicos are the highest points, and each reaches only 48 metres. The rest is mostly flat limestone, with marshes and mangrove swamps. The eight main islands and more than 22 smaller ones add up to 616.3 square kilometres. Fresh water is scarce, so households catch rain in private cisterns. Spiny lobster, conch and other shellfish are the main natural resources.
Summer temperatures rarely pass 33 degrees Celsius, and winter nights rarely drop below 18. The sea runs 28-29 degrees in summer and 23-26 in winter. A steady trade wind keeps the heat comfortable. The islands are generally said to enjoy 350 days of sun a year, though hurricanes strike often.
The oldest established salt-pan development in the Caribbean created conditions that favoured many unusual species. Endemic lizards, snakes, insects, plants and marine organisms live here, and seabirds breed on the islands. Three terrestrial ecoregions are present: Bahamian dry forests, Bahamian pineyards and Bahamian-Antillean mangroves. The British and local governments share responsibility for protecting this wildlife under international environmental conventions. Because of it, the islands appear on the United Kingdom's tentative list for future UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Sometime between AD 500 and 800, Arawakan-speaking people most likely crossed to these islands from Hispaniola. At about the same time, Taíno people moved from Cuba to the southern Bahamas. Together these streams of settlers developed into the Lucayan. According to scholars Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius, Classical Taínos from Hispaniola resettled the Turks and Caicos around 1200 CE.
Nobody knows who the first European to see the islands was. Some sources say Christopher Columbus sighted them in 1492, during his voyage to the Americas. Others consider it more likely that the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León arrived first, in 1512.
Either way, the timing was grim. By 1512 the Spanish were seizing Taíno and Lucayan people as forced labourers under the encomienda system. Hispaniola's own native population had largely collapsed, and the Spanish needed replacements. Diseases to which the islanders had no immunity added to the toll. By about 1513 the southern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos stood completely empty. That emptiness lasted until the 17th century.
Around the middle of the 1600s, salt collectors from Bermuda began sailing to the islands each season. In time they settled more permanently and brought enslaved Africans with them. For several decades around the turn of the 17th century, the islands also became a favourite hideout for pirates.
War then reached the archipelago. During the Anglo-French War of 1778-1783, the French captured it in 1783. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 later confirmed it as a British colony.
The American War of Independence sent a new wave of settlers. Many Loyalists fled to British Caribbean colonies, and they carried enslaved Africans with them. They grew cotton as a cash crop, but salt soon overtook it. The salt work was done by enslaved people brought from Africa or other Caribbean islands, and by their descendants. These workers soon outnumbered the European settlers.
In 1799 Britain annexed both the Turks and the Caicos groups as part of the Bahamas. Sea salt had become an important West Indian export, and it remained a major one into the nineteenth century.
In 1807 Britain prohibited the slave trade, and in 1833 it abolished slavery across its colonies. British ships sometimes intercepted slave traders in the Caribbean, and some slave ships were wrecked off these islands.
In 1837 a Portuguese slaver, the Esperança, wrecked off East Caicos. The crew and 220 captive Africans survived the wreck. Eighteen of the captives died before the survivors were taken to Nassau. Some of them may have been among the 189 liberated Africans whom British colonists settled in the islands between 1833 and 1840.
The Trouvadore, an illegal Spanish slave ship, wrecked off East Caicos in 1841. All 20 crew and all 192 captives survived. Officials freed the Africans and arranged for 168 of them to be apprenticed for one year to island proprietors on Grand Turk. That raised the small colony's population by seven per cent. The other 24 were resettled in Nassau. The Spanish crew went there too, to be handed to the Cuban consul and taken to Cuba for prosecution.
An 1878 letter still records the "Trouvadore Africans" and their descendants as an essential part of the "labouring population." In 2004, marine archaeologists linked to the Turks and Caicos National Museum found a wreck they called the "Black Rock Ship." Later research suggested it might be the Trouvadore. In November 2008 an expedition funded by the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that its artifacts matched the Trouvadore in style and date of manufacture.
On the larger Caicos islands, women still make baskets and hats from straw. The source suggests this tradition may trace back to the liberated Africans of the 1830s and 1841, who brought their craft skills with them.
In 1917, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden suggested that the Turks and Caicos join Canada. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George rejected the idea, and the islands stayed a dependency of Jamaica. That was only one stop in a long run of administrative homes.
Britain had made the islands a separate colony under a council president in 1848. In 1873-74 they were folded into Jamaica, and in 1894 the chief colonial official became a commissioner. On the 4th of July 1959 they became a separate colony again, though Jamaica's governor still governed them. When Jamaica gained independence in August 1962, the islands became a Crown colony. From 1965 the governor of the Bahamas oversaw their affairs.
When the Bahamas became independent in 1973, the islands finally received their own governor. In 1974 Canadian MP Max Saltsman of the New Democratic Party introduced bill C-249, "An Act Respecting a Proposed Association Between Canada and the Caribbean Turks and Caicos Islands." It never came to a vote.
Since August 1976 the islands have had their own government, headed by a chief minister, now called a premier. The first was J. A. G. S. McCartney, known as Jags. The islands adopted their first constitution on the 30th of August 1976, and that date is now the national holiday, Constitution Day. McCartney was born on Grand Turk in 1945. He died in a plane crash over New Jersey in 1980, and the airport serving Cockburn Town bears his name.
The push for independence faded in the early 1980s, after voters in 1980 elected an anti-independence party. The islands have stayed British since. Then came a run of scandals. Chief Minister Norman B. Saunders was arrested in Miami in March 1985. In July of that year he was sentenced to eight years in prison on conspiracy charges linked to drug smuggling. Nathaniel Francis served as acting chief minister until July 1986, when he was forced to resign over charges of corruption and patronage.
Local government was suspended from 1986 to 1988 after allegations that officials were involved in drug trafficking. A four-member interim Advisory Council ran affairs from July 1986, and it included Clement Howell and Ariel Misick. Oswald Skippings returned as chief minister on the 3rd of March 1988. Washington Misick held the post from April 1991 to the 31st of January 1995.
In 2002 the islands became a British Overseas Territory, and islanders gained full British citizenship. Michael Misick became chief minister in August 2003, and in August 2006 he became the first premier. A new constitution came in 2006. In early 2009, facing corruption charges, he resigned, and the United Kingdom took direct control. He later faced trial on charges of conspiracy to receive bribes, conspiracy to defraud the government and money laundering.
His marriage drew attention too. American actress LisaRaye McCoy married him in April 2006. In 2008 she announced that they were divorcing, citing corruption of government funds, infidelity and bribery. The divorce was finalized in 2010.
During direct rule, in 2010, the leaders of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos discussed forming a federation. A new constitution arrived in October 2012, and the November 2012 elections returned government to local hands. Rufus Ewing of the Progressive National Party became premier. Under that constitution, a single-chamber House of Assembly holds 19 seats. Fifteen are elected for four-year terms and four are appointed by the governor.
In 2016 the People's Democratic Movement won, and Sharlene Cartwright-Robinson became premier. It was the first time the Progressive National Party had lost since it ousted Derek Hugh Taylor's government in 2003. In 2021 the party won in a landslide, and Washington Misick returned as premier.
Citizenship has its own twist. British Overseas Territories citizenship carries no automatic right to live in the territory. Those rights come from belonger status, held by natives and their descendants. A 2021 amendment to the immigration law narrowed how outsiders can earn it. Someone who invests $500,000 or more in Providenciales or West Caicos can also obtain a residence permit for up to ten years.
Until the 1960s, salt together with small exports of sponge and hemp kept the economy going, though only barely. Population barely grew. Then American investors arrived and paid for an airstrip on Providenciales. They also built the archipelago's first hotel, The Third Turtle. Club Med soon opened a resort at Grace Bay. In the 1980s it funded an upgrade of the airstrip so larger aircraft could land, and tourism has risen steadily since.
The figures show the climb. Tourist arrivals reached 264,887 in 2007 and 351,498 by 2009. In 2010, 245 cruise ships called at the Grand Turk Cruise Terminal, carrying 617,863 visitors. In 2024 the islands had a record year, with over 2 million visitors.
The government follows a two-pronged plan. Upmarket resorts target wealthy travellers, while a large cruise port and recreation centre on Grand Turk serves the masses. Visitors can also see one of the longest coral reefs in the world and the world's only conch farm.
Celebrities have followed. Dick Clark and Bruce Willis owned homes here, and Nile Rodgers keeps a vacation home. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner married on Parrot Cay in 2005. Eva Longoria and Tony Parker honeymooned here in July 2007.
Since 2003 the Turks and Caicos Tourist Board has staged a week-long concert series in late summer to fill the quiet season. The Turks & Caicos Music and Cultural Festival is held in a temporary bandshell at Turtle Cove Marina on Providenciales. It has featured Lionel Richie, LL Cool J, Alicia Keys, John Legend and Boyz II Men, among others. More than 10,000 people attend each year.
In 2009, hotels and restaurants made up 34.67 per cent of economic output, and financial services 13.12 per cent. The territory's gross domestic product in late 2009 was approximately US$795 million, or $24,273 per person. The US dollar is the main currency. Most capital goods and food are imported.
Fishing remains a pillar. In 2000, lobster, dried and fresh conch, and conch shells brought in some $169.2 million in exports, mostly to the United Kingdom and United States. The catch has been declining in recent years. The islands also once served as a trans-shipment point for South American narcotics headed to the United States. A joint American, Bahamian and local effort has greatly reduced that trade.
All 236.5 gigawatt-hours of electricity the islands produce and use each year come from fossil fuels.
In 2024, the Turks and Caicos Islands had the highest murder rate per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported 76.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest of any country or dependent territory.
The Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force does most of the policing, and the Border Force handles customs and border enforcement. The United Kingdom is responsible for defence. After a surge in gang-related violence in 2022, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary sent RFA Tideforce. Its Wildcat helicopter gave surveillance support to local law enforcement.
In December 2019, Governor Nigel Dakin announced the Turks and Caicos Islands Regiment, built with help from the British Ministry of Defence. It focuses on national security, disaster response and engineering support. In spring 2020 a Ministry of Defence team arrived to help with the COVID-19 pandemic, the hurricane season and the regiment itself. Lieutenant Colonel Ennis Grant became its first commanding officer.
In November 2024, HMS Medway visited under the Royal Navy's Atlantic Patrol Task (North) mission. The River-class patrol vessel ran disaster response exercises with the local authorities and the regiment.
Visitors face risks of their own. In 2024 several American tourists were arrested for possessing small arms ammunition, and each faced a 12-year mandatory prison term. On the 6th of March 2025, the U.S. State Department issued a Level 2 travel advisory over crime. It urged increased caution and did not discourage travel.
Trouble also arrived from the sky. In 2025 the seventh flight test of SpaceX Starship exploded within sight of the islands. More than 230 airline flights had to change course or delay departure to avoid falling debris. That disrupted the travels of more than 40,000 people. Officials found no injuries and only minor damage to one vehicle. The eighth flight test ended similarly, and the FAA said it disrupted about 240 flights.
Updated
Common questions
Where are the Turks and Caicos Islands?
They lie in the North Atlantic, southeast of the Bahamas and about 160 kilometres north of Hispaniola. They consist of the Turks Islands and the larger Caicos Islands.
How did the Turks Islands get their name?
They are named after the Turk's cap cactus, Melocactus intortus, whose red crown resembles the fez worn by Turks in the late Ottoman Empire.
Who lived on the islands before Europeans arrived?
Arawakan-speaking people and Taíno settlers developed into the Lucayan people. Spanish capture of islanders as forced labourers, along with new diseases, left the islands completely empty by about 1513.
Who owns or governs the Turks and Caicos Islands today?
They are a British Overseas Territory with their own government. A governor represents the British sovereign, and an elected premier leads the local administration under the constitution of October 2012.
What drives the economy?
Tourism, offshore finance and fishing dominate. Salt once sustained the islands, but American investment in the 1960s began the shift toward resorts and cruise visitors.
What was the Trouvadore?
It was an illegal Spanish slave ship wrecked off East Caicos in 1841. Its captives were freed, and a wreck found in 2004, the Black Rock Ship, was later linked to it by its artifacts.
All sources
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