Little Cayman Island
Find your own zen on what feels almost like your own private island
Little Cayman is located only 80 miles northeast of Grand Cayman, yet it feels worlds away. Nowhere in the Cayman Islands can you find a better dive destination that’s also a romantic getaway.
The island’s 150 residents (when everyone’s home) happily welcome you to their serene and safe island. Little Cayman Beach Resort’s Beach Nuts Bar is the island hot spot, especially on karaoke night. If you’re more into peace and quiet, then your idea of island Zen might be enjoying a drink with someone special in a secluded niche on the property or lying in hammock on the beach to count stars in the clear night sky.
You can leave your hurry behind, because you’ll be on Little Cayman Island time. In addition to world-class diving, you can rent a kayak and visit nearby Owen’s Island for some snorkeling; tour the Central Caribbean Marine Institute and learn how they’re studying and saving reefs; grab a bike and go exploring; or just read a book in the shade of the palm trees that surround our pool and beach.
History of the Cayman Islands
There is no record of pre-European settlement of the Cayman Islands. The three small specks in the Caribbean remained unknown until the morning of May 10, 1503, when a sailor on Christopher Columbus’s fourth and final voyage to the new world spotted two low lying islands whose surrounding waters were teeming with sea turtles. He called them “Las Tortugas.” The discoveries later renamed the Cayman Islands were a stopping point for the seafaring powers of Europe but were not settled until the 1700s.
Though settlement of Grand Cayman was underway by the 1730s, emigration to the Sister Islands did not begin until a full century later. Prior to settlement, the islands were known to, and used by turtle hunters and fishermen from Grand Cayman and Jamaica. Lured by available land and abundant fishing, early Sister Islanders came largely from a small handful of families, making the eighty-odd mile trip from Grand Cayman in open canoes.
England took formal control of the Cayman Islands as a result of the Treaty of Madrid in 1670. The Islands were governed as part of the colony of Jamaica until 1962 when they became a separate Crown Colony and Jamaica became an independent commonwealth. The Cayman Islands remain a Crown Colony to this day with the Governor appointed by the British Parliament.