Central America’s least crowded country guards a coral corridor
Belize, on Central America's northeastern coast between Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean, is the region's least populated country, with 397,483 people on 22,970 square kilometres. Once British Honduras, it won independence on 21 September 1981, and its coral reefs anchor the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.
The Maya spread into the area around 1500 BC and flourished for well over two thousand years. Caracol, in the south-centre, may have supported more than 140,000 people, while Lamanai dominated north of the Maya Mountains, and in the late Classic era somewhere between 400,000 and 1,000,000 people may have lived within today's borders. Arriving in the sixteenth century, Spaniards found at least three Maya territories, including Chetumal province around Corozal Bay, but never managed to settle the land.
The earliest known record of the name comes from the Dominican friar José Delgado, who in 1677 crossed a river he called Rio Balis. A later legend credits a Scottish buccaneer, Peter Wallace, though nothing shows he existed. English buccaneers did come, sheltering from Spanish ships and cutting logwood, a source of fast black dye, and the first permanent British settlement dates to about 1716, worked by enslaved Africans. In 1798 settlers known as Baymen repelled a Spanish fleet at St George's Caye, now a national holiday.
Britain appointed its first superintendent in 1786 and made the territory the Crown Colony of British Honduras, subordinate to Jamaica, in 1862. When slavery ended in 1833, owners there received the highest average compensation per enslaved person anywhere in the empire, and debt peonage kept freed workers cutting mahogany. The Belize Estate and Produce Company eventually held half of all private land. The Great Depression and a devastating 1931 hurricane brought the colony close to economic collapse.
Anger at the 1949 devaluation of the local dollar spawned the People's United Party, which won the first universal-suffrage election in 1954 and, under George Price, dominated politics for three decades. Self-government came in 1964 and the name Belize in 1973. Guatemala's claim to the territory slowed independence and led it to withhold recognition afterwards, so about 1,500 British troops stayed on. Belmopan is the capital, and Belize City the largest city.
Source: Belize
