Cayman Islands

Grand Cayman — the largest island (35km long, 197km²) with Seven Mile Beach (one of the Caribbean’s finest beaches — actually 5.5 miles of unbroken white sand on the west coast, the financial and hotel district of Grand Cayman running along its entire length, calm Caribbean water of great clarity) and the capital Georgetown (the financial centre of the Caribbean, home to 600+ banks and the fifth-largest financial centre in the world by value of assets).

The Cayman Islands are the fifth-largest financial centre in the world by assets managed — over 600 banks, 100,000+ registered companies and 10,000 mutual funds are registered in these three islands of 80,000 people. The offshore financial system (developed from the 1960s, with no corporate tax, no capital gains tax and no income tax) means the Cayman Islands hold more US dollars on deposit than any place outside the US itself.

Stingray City — a sandbar in the North Sound of Grand Cayman at 1m depth, where approximately 30–50 southern stingrays (Hypanus americanus) have been conditioned since the 1980s to associate human boats with food, and now approach snorkellers to be fed, touched and photographed — the most visited snorkel and dive experience in the Caribbean, with 1 million visitors per year.

Stingray City developed accidentally from the 1970s when fishing boats from Georgetown cleaned their catch at this shallow sandbar and threw fish scraps overboard — the stingrays learned that boat engines meant food. By the 1980s scuba divers were exploiting this conditioning deliberately. Today the stingrays are fully habituated; they approach humans proactively, draping themselves over divers’ shoulders in an entirely natural-seeming interaction that was created by 50 years of accidental conditioning.

The USS Kittiwake (a decommissioned US Navy submarine rescue vessel deliberately sunk in 2011 as an artificial reef in 18–30m off Seven Mile Beach — one of the finest purpose-sunk dive wrecks in the Caribbean, with multiple entry points, the engine room, galley, crew quarters and decompression chambers all accessible) and the Cayman Wall (the vertical drop-off from the reef shelf at 18m to 2,000m — the finest wall dive in the western Caribbean).

The Cayman Wall (the edge of the Cayman Ridge — a submarine mountain range rising from 5,000m depth to within metres of the surface, creating a vertical wall that drops from 18m to over 2,000m in a single dive) is the defining dive site of Grand Cayman. The clarity (30m+ visibility) means the wall disappears into blue darkness below, creating a vertiginous sensation.

The Cayman Turtle Conservation and Education Centre (the only sea turtle farm in the world, which breeds green sea turtles for conservation release — an attempt to restore the once-abundant turtle population that was hunted to near-extinction in the Cayman Islands by 1800) with the Cayman Islands National Museum and the Rum Point beach (the finest quiet beach on the north coast, with hammocks, clear water and fresh coconut water).

The Cayman Islands were named by Christopher Columbus on 10 May 1503 — he called them Las Tortugas (The Turtles) after the vast numbers of green sea turtles he observed in the surrounding waters. The Cayman turtle fishery (15th–19th century) supplied ships across the Caribbean with fresh meat; by 1800 the original population of millions of turtles had been reduced to near-extinction. The turtles have not recovered to historical levels despite 50 years of protection.

30 min flight. Little Cayman (the smallest inhabited Cayman island, population 200 — one of the least disturbed coral reef ecosystems in the western Caribbean, with the Bloody Bay Wall — widely considered the finest wall dive in the Caribbean, dropping from 6m to over 1,000m in absolute clarity) and the Booby Pond Nature Reserve (the largest red-footed booby colony in the Western Hemisphere, 20,000 nesting pairs).

The Bloody Bay Wall on Little Cayman (a vertical wall beginning at just 6m depth, dropping immediately to 1,000m+ — the shallowest wall start of any major Caribbean wall dive) is consistently voted the finest wall dive in the Caribbean by dive magazines. The great clarity (35m+) and the abrupt transition from the shallow reef shelf to the vertical wall creates an experience of weightless suspension above an abyss.

30 min flight from Little Cayman. Cayman Brac (the middle island, named for the Gaelic word for bluff — a 37m limestone cliff that dominates the eastern half of the island) with the Peter Pan cemetery (the graves of victims of the 1932 hurricane, Cayman’s worst natural disaster, killing 109 people from a population of 1,400) and the Cayman Brac Parrot (a subspecies found only on this island, with 400 surviving individuals).

The 1932 Cayman Brac hurricane (November 8, 1932 — a Category 5 storm that struck Cayman Brac with no warning, killing 109 of the island’s 1,400 residents — a death rate of nearly 8% of the population) remains the deadliest natural disaster in Cayman Islands history. Survivors sheltered in the limestone caves in the Bluff; the graves of the victims in Peter Pan cemetery are still maintained by islanders.

A final morning in Georgetown — the Cayman Islands duty-free shopping area (the finest duty-free watches, jewellery and rum in the Caribbean — the island has no customs duty on many goods and Kirk Freeport is the largest duty-free retailer in the Caribbean) and a final seafood lunch at Camana Bay (the new-urbanist town centre development on Seven Mile Beach). Fly from Grand Cayman (GCM).

Cayman rum cake (a dense, dark rum-soaked fruitcake made with local Caribbean rum, often containing whole cashew nuts — sold in vacuum-packed tins in every Georgetown shop) is the defining edible souvenir of the Cayman Islands and is the most exported food product. The original recipe was developed by Tortuga Rum Company in the 1980s; it is now the most widely consumed rum cake in the Caribbean.