Trinidad and Tobago

The southernmost of the islands, the least dependent on tourism, and the most demographically complex. Trinidad lies a few miles off Venezuela and was Spanish for nearly three centuries without being developed; in 1783 Madrid issued the Cedula of Population offering land to Catholic settlers, and French planters arrived from the other islands with the people they enslaved. Britain took the island in 1797 and inherited a Spanish colony with a French-speaking planter class and a Catholic population, which is why the culture is unlike anything in the British Caribbean. Tobago, conquered and traded repeatedly, was joined to it administratively only in 1889. After emancipation the estates recruited indentured labour from India between 1845 and 1917, bringing roughly one hundred and forty thousand people, and Indo-Trinidadians are now about the same share of the population as Afro-Trinidadians. Oil changed everything else. Commercial production began in 1908 and made the country an industrial exporter rather than a resort economy, with refining, petrochemicals and later liquefied natural gas. The steelpan was invented in Port of Spain in the 1930s and 1940s from discarded oil drums, the only acoustic instrument family created in the twentieth century. Carnival and calypso came from the same streets. Independence came in 1962 and republic status in 1976. The Black Power uprising of 1970 nearly toppled the government. Port of Spain is the capital. The Pitch Lake at La Brea is the largest natural asphalt deposit in the world. The scarlet ibis is the national bird. Tobago's Main Ridge is among the oldest legally protected forest reserves anywhere, set aside in 1776.

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