Columbus renamed Karukera after a Spanish Guadalupe shrine
Guadeloupe is a French overseas department in the Caribbean: six inhabited islands including butterfly-shaped Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, plus Marie-Galante, La Désirade, and the Saintes. Indigenous Arawakan speakers called the place Karukera—“Island of Beautiful Waters.”
Columbus sighted the islands in November 1493, and Spanish attempts to colonise them in the sixteenth century failed against Indigenous resistance. Settlement may date to 3000 BCE, with Arawakan peoples followed by the Kalinago; the Morel site at Le Moule on Grande-Terre is now a public archaeological park. British forces held the islands during the Seven Years’ War until 1763, when Pointe-à-Pitre grew into a major harbour and sugar flowed to British America.
The Revolution granted freedmen equal rights, Britain seized Guadeloupe in 1794, and in 1802 Antoine Richepanse’s expedition crushed a rebellion by the Black officers then running the colony. After a brief Swedish interlude, the 1814 and 1815 treaties restored French control. Slavery ended in 1848, though planters tightly restricted what freed people could do.
Félix Éboué became the first Black governor in 1936. The islands sided with Vichy before joining Free France in 1943 and became an overseas department in 1946. Police fired on striking factory workers at Le Moule in 1952, an independence movement grew in the 1970s, autonomy widened in 1982, Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy voted to leave its jurisdiction in 2003, and a 2009 general strike protested low wages and high prices.
The two main islands form a butterfly: volcanic Basse-Terre to the west and Grande-Terre to the east, divided by the narrow Rivière Salée channel. Marie-Galante is third in size, La Désirade is a tilted limestone plateau rising to 275 metres, and of the eight Saintes only Terre-de-Haut and Terre-de-Bas are inhabited. The creeping cucumber is sometimes called the Guadeloupe cucumber.
Source: Guadeloupe
