Bermuda

Bermuda sits alone in the North Atlantic, closer to Nova Scotia than to the Caribbean it is so often mistaken for. It is not, technically, a Caribbean island — it sits about 1,000 miles north of the Antilles, perched on the rim of an ancient underwater volcano, connected to nothing. That isolation shaped everything: its culture, its economy, its stubborn distinctiveness. The island is a British Overseas Territory, and the Britishness is real — red phone boxes, driving on the left, afternoon tea taken seriously — layered over a population that is majority Black, with deep roots in the histories of enslaved Africans, free Black settlers, and a complex colonial past that the island is still actively reckoning with.

The island was uninhabited when Spanish sailors stumbled on it in the early 1500s, and deliberately avoided — the surrounding reefs made it a graveyard for ships. The English arrived by accident in 1609 when the Sea Venture, en route to Jamestown, wrecked on the reefs. The survivors spent ten months building two new ships from Bermuda cedar and sailed on to Virginia, but the stories they brought back — of a lush, temperate island with abundant food and no hostile inhabitants — sparked permanent settlement the following year. Those shipwrecked survivors are also believed to have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, which gives Bermuda a literary origin story most places would kill for.

What most visitors encounter today is a genuinely lovely place: pastel-painted limestone cottages with white stepped roofs designed to collect rainwater (fresh water is scarce — there are no rivers or lakes), the famously pink-sand beaches caused by crushed coral and shells mixed with white sand, and water that is extraordinarily clear and blue-green in a way that photographs cannot fully capture. The island is small — 21 square miles — and shaped like a fishhook, easily navigated by moped. Hamilton is the capital and commercial center; St. George's, on the eastern end, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the oldest continuously inhabited English town in the New World. The Bermuda Triangle, for what it's worth, is more legend than documented phenomenon — and Bermudans are largely tired of being asked about it.