A spice isle won independence in 1974, then a 1979 revolution
Southernmost of the Windwards, Grenada sits about 100 miles north of Trinidad with 344 square kilometres and roughly 114,621 people in 2024 across the main island, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique. Kalinago peoples lived there before Columbus sighted it in 1498; independence came on 7 February 1974 under Eric Gairy.
Nobody is sure where the name came from, but Spanish sailors probably borrowed it from the city of Granada; Spanish maps showed Granada by the 1520s and called the islands to the north Los Granadillos. Columbus had called it La Concepción in 1498, Amerigo Vespucci may have renamed it Mayo in 1499, and earlier Arawak inhabitants knew it as Camajuya. Lake cores hint at people from about 3600 BC, permanent villages appear around 100 to 200 CE, and population peaked between 750 and 1250.
In 1649 Jacques Dyel du Parquet led 203 Frenchmen from Martinique to found a lasting settlement. A peace with the Carib chief Kairouane broke down within months, and by 1654 the French had crushed resistance. La Grenade ran on sugar and indigo worked by enslaved Africans, whose numbers swelled from a couple of hundred in 1669 to some 15,200 on the eve of British rule; cocoa arrived in 1714.
Britain gained the island by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, lost it after the Comte d'Estaing's victory in 1779 and regained it in 1783. By 1807 some 114,000 enslaved Africans had been shipped in, and slavery was abolished in 1833. A passing ship left nutmeg trees in 1843, founding the crop behind the nickname Island of Spice. Grenada became a Crown colony in 1877; Theophilus Marryshow campaigned for representative government from 1918, and Eric Gairy's union-led strike of 1951 brought the fiery sky red days before the first universal-suffrage election that October.
After the West Indies Federation of 1958–62, Grenada became an Associated State in 1967 and independent in 1974. On 13 March 1979, with Gairy abroad, the New JEWEL Movement seized power without bloodshed and Maurice Bishop led a People's Revolutionary Government close to Cuba and Nicaragua. In 1983 hardliners around deputy prime minister Bernard Coard turned on Bishop, whose ouster and execution preceded a United States invasion.
Source: Grenada
