The Colombian island of San Andrés along with neighbour, Providencia, has a long historical relationship to Jamaica. These small islands are closer to Kingston than to their nation’s capital, Bogotá. Everywhere surnames and place names illustrate the indelible impact of centuries of English and Jamaican colonisation. Indeed, about 30 per cent of the 75,000 people on San Andrés speak a heavily English-based Creole language called raizal. Today San Andrés faces modern problems of rising homicide rates, civil breakdown, drug trafficking, and economic and environmental challenges similar to those in Jamaica.

The history of San Andrés could, in some ways, be a microcosm of the history of Jamaica. The island, about seven miles long and a mile and a half wide, appears in Spanish maps as early as 1527, but it was not permanently settled until the late 1620s by some Puritans from Barbados and England along with some Dutch. The Spanish destroyed the fledgling settlement in 1641. The English returned to cut logwood and after the capture of Jamaica in 1655, buccaneers, including Henry Morgan, found the island a convenient location to prey on Spanish treasure fleets travelling to their rendezvous in Havana. The English controlled the island until the late 18th century when it became a free port. By that time Jamaican fishermen were beginning to use the islands for long-term, semi-permanent residence.

In the early 19th century a group of locals including Solomon Taylor, Juan Taylor, Roberto Clark, Jorge Ellis, and Isaac Brooks signed a document requesting that San Andrés be part of Simon Bolivar’s Gran Colombia state, rather than a part of the Central American Republics. The names suggest a population mixture was already taking place, although English language and culture remained predominant. In 1928 Colombia and Nicaragua signed an agreement recognising the group of Caribbean islands, including San Andrés, as Colombian territory under the administration of the department of Magdalena.

The Sandinista government of Nicaragua repudiated the agreement in the late 1980s and pursued international legal claims to the islands. Colombia, on the other hand, made the islands a special department with special privileges rather like France’s overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe. The islands have a local departmental administrative assembly and a locally elected governor. They also send two representatives to the National Assembly in Bogota. The nine seats of the local assembly are represented by six different political parties.

The economy of San Andrés has always been precarious but until the 1970s the population was relatively small. The early Puritans brought slaves from Jamaica to cut logwood and grow cotton and tobacco. Under Morgan piracy sustained the local economy. Between 1850 and 1950 fishing and copra exports from the abundant coconut trees that still surround the island represented major cash activities. During this period one JH Lynton arrived and did very well, owning three houses along the main street in the capital. His gravestone on the university campus announces that he was born in “St Elizabeth, Kingston, Jamaica, on January 13, 1870 and died in San Andrés Island on November 30, 1949.” The creation of a free trade zone in 1954 along with attempts to develop tourism brought a flood of immigrants to the island, especially after 1970. In the 1950s the population was still about 20,000. The subsequent residential disruption and environmental degradation, especially of the surrounding coral reefs, have forced some major changes on the island.

Most of the population of San Andrés cluster at the northern part of the island. Elsewhere groves of coconut palms and diverse hardwood and ornamental trees cover the landscape, giving an impression of ample unused space. But many locals complain of overpopulation, rising prices and the considerable decline of the coral reefs. The island has no rivers but a large fresh water pond and adequate amounts of underground water collected in the limestone base provide ample supplies of potable water. In 2000 UNESCO declared the islands and a swath of surrounding seas to be a World Biosphere Reserve.

A small, beautifully laid-out and extremely well administered botanical garden under the administration of the National University represents an exemplary model of its kind. Apart from well-tended collections of the local fauna and flora, the area seeks to preserve samples of all ornamental shrubs, local hardwood and fruit trees. The gardens also offer academic courses in botany to college students and host more than 10,000 visiting elementary and high school children each year. It publishes elegantly designed informative pamphlets of its holdings and its activities. Hope Gardens would do well to emulate this model.

The local branch of the National University of Colombia is a fledgling effort with huge ambitions. It has a dynamic Centre for Caribbean Studies that offers undergraduate and graduate courses and is building a doctoral programme. The environmental and social science programmes are apparently good enough to attract students from across the nation. The university cooperates with internal universities and hosts scholars from France, Spain, Austria, the USA and Mexico as well as from other major public and private Colombian universities.

Building economic sustainability constitutes an ongoing challenge. One controversial issue relates to tourists cards. Every non-resident visiting the island must buy a relatively expensive tourist card. Apparently, a part of the revenue goes to the island’s treasury. But the idea of charging nationals to visit a part of their own country supported by their taxes strikes many as incongruous. Residency is strictly controlled too and it is as difficult to obtain permanent residency in San Andrés as it is in France or Switzerland. Owning property locally does not facilitate the acquisition of permanent residency.

San Andrés and its sister islands are not yet paradise. The cost of living and housing prices approach the astronomical. Drug gangs operate with the predictable consequences. A massive police and military presence from the mainland, accompanied by the US Drug Enforcement Agency, gives the impression of an occupied state. Nevertheless, these islands are facing their future boldly.