A French Caribbean island once called the land of flowers
Martinique, a Lesser Antilles island in the eastern Caribbean, is a French overseas department, region, and single territorial collectivity—inside the EU as an outermost region yet outside Schengen and the customs union. About 349,925 people lived on 1,128 square kilometres as of January 2024.
UNESCO listed the whole land-and-sea territory as a Biosphere Reserve in 2021; in September 2023 Mount Pelée’s volcanoes and northern forests gained further heritage status. Kalinago names Madinina or Madiana (“island of flowers”) and Jouanacaëra (“island of iguanas”) underlie the French label Columbus heard in 1502. Saladoid settlers from the Orinoco arrived in the first century AD; Kalinago followed from the Venezuelan coast around the eleventh century.
Columbus charted the island in 1493 without landing, then watered there for three days on 15 June 1502 after a twenty-one-day trade-wind run. Spain ceded the island to France in 1635; Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc landed at St. Pierre that September with eighty to one hundred fifty settlers. Sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans expanded after Dutch Jews expelled from Portuguese Brazil arrived in 1654. Britain seized the island repeatedly; after Napoleonic swaps it returned to France in 1815 and has stayed French since.
French and Martinican Creole are both widely spoken; the euro is legal tender. Windward neighbours are Saint Lucia south, Barbados southeast, and Dominica north. Blackbeard seized the French frigate La Concorde off the island on 28 November 1717, sold the enslaved people aboard, and turned her into his flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge. Coffee arrived in the 1720s, making Martinique the first coffee-growing land in the Western Hemisphere, and after revolts in 1789, 1815 and 1822 and campaigning by Victor Schœlcher, abolition took effect here first among French territories, on 23 May 1848.
Catastrophe came on 8 May 1902, when Mont Pelée obliterated St. Pierre and some 30,000 people died; the lone survivor in town, Ludger Sylbaris, was shielded by the thick walls of his prison cell, and the capital moved to Fort-de-France. Vichy rule under Admiral Georges Robert let German U-boats refuel here until Free French forces took over on 14 July 1943. The colony became an overseas department by unanimous vote in 1946, and in a January 2010 referendum 68.4 percent approved turning it into a single collectivity.
Source: Martinique
