The Island That Was Evacuated
Hurricane Irma flattened Barbuda in 2017 and the island was evacuated completely — for the first time in roughly three hundred years, nobody lived there. Months later, with residents still displaced, the law that had held Barbudan land communally since emancipation was amended to permit freehold sale.
On 6 September 2017, Hurricane Irma passed directly over Barbuda as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds around 300 kilometres an hour. It damaged or destroyed the overwhelming majority of structures on the island. Two days later, with Hurricane José forecast on the same track, the government ordered a full evacuation, and for the first time in roughly three hundred years Barbuda had no permanent human population at all.
Most of the 1,800 residents were taken to Antigua, forty kilometres south. What happened next is a dispute about land that goes back to the seventeenth century and is still running.
Two islands, one state, no comparison
Antigua and Barbuda are a single sovereign country and are almost nothing alike.
Antigua is the populous one — around ninety-five per cent of the country’s people, a functioning international airport, cruise berths at St John’s, and the claim, repeated on every tourist brochure, of 365 beaches, one for each day of the year. It is dry, low, deforested by three centuries of sugar, and ringed with reef.
Barbuda is flat coral limestone, sparsely populated, with a lagoon holding one of the largest frigatebird colonies in the world — several thousand pairs nesting in the mangrove at Codrington, where the males inflate scarlet throat pouches the size of a football and the birds can be approached by boat to within a few metres.
The beach on Barbuda’s west side runs for something like seventeen kilometres of pink-tinted sand with essentially nothing on it. That emptiness is the entire subject of the argument.
Land held in common
Barbuda was leased in 1685 by the Codrington family, who used it not as a plantation island — the soil would not support sugar at scale — but as a supply estate for their Antiguan plantations, provisioning them with food, livestock and, in the terms of the period, people.
When emancipation came, the Barbudans who remained were not distributed individual plots. They continued to work the land collectively, and over the following century and a half that practice hardened into a settled system: land on Barbuda was held communally by all Barbudans, not owned individually, and could not be sold. The arrangement was given statutory form by the Barbuda Land Act of 2007, which vested the land in the people of Barbuda in common and required a referendum before any major development.
In 2018, months after the evacuation, the Antiguan parliament amended that act to permit freehold ownership. The government’s position was that communal tenure prevented Barbudans from raising mortgages, blocked investment and left the island economically stranded. The Barbuda Council and a substantial part of the population argued that it was the dismantling of a three-hundred-year-old system of collective ownership, pushed through while people were displaced and unable to organise.
The island was empty of its people for the first time in three centuries, and that was the moment the law on who owned it changed.
Litigation followed, including cases that have reached the Caribbean Court of Justice, and construction of a second airport and resort developments proceeded during it. Barbudans returned over subsequent months and years — many to houses that had not been rebuilt — and the argument about whether recovery aid was directed at housing or at development infrastructure has been sustained and bitter.
It is one of the clearest live cases anywhere of the collision between customary collective tenure and a development model that requires alienable title, and it is happening on an island most visitors have never heard of.
Nelson’s Dockyard
Antigua’s principal historic site is a working Georgian naval dockyard — the only one anywhere that survives substantially intact and is still in use — inscribed by UNESCO in 2016.
English Harbour was chosen because it is a deep, narrow, hurricane-safe inlet with a hidden entrance, and the Royal Navy built the yard through the eighteenth century to maintain the fleet that protected the sugar islands. Horatio Nelson served here from 1784 to 1787 and disliked it intensely.
The buildings — the sail loft pillars, the copper and lumber store, the officers’ quarters — were constructed by enslaved labour, and the UNESCO inscription and the site’s own interpretation now say so directly, which was not always the case. The yard functions today as a marina and is the finish of the Antigua Sailing Week and the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, which means the harbour in season holds several hundred million pounds’ worth of yachts moored inside a monument to the economy that paid for the original ones.
Cricket, and what an island exports
Antigua’s other global contribution is disproportionate and rarely mentioned in travel writing: for a country of under a hundred thousand people it has supplied an extraordinary number of West Indies cricketers, several of them among the greatest to play the game.
Viv Richards — born in St John’s, captain of the West Indies through the era when the team was effectively unbeatable — has a stadium named after him on the island. Andy Roberts and Curtly Ambrose, two of the fastest bowlers the sport has produced, came from the same small population.
This matters beyond sport. West Indies cricket in the 1970s and 80s was, explicitly and by the players’ own account, a political proposition: a team drawn from a set of small, recently independent former colonies, going to England and Australia and winning consistently, at a moment when that outcome carried a great deal of meaning across the region and the diaspora.
The Antigua Recreation Ground in St John’s, the old test venue, is where Brian Lara twice broke the world record for the highest individual test score. Test cricket has largely moved to the newer stadium outside town, but the old ground is a five-minute walk from the harbour and the significance has not moved with the fixtures.
Reef, and what is happening to it
The waters between the two islands hold reef systems that have been under the same pressures as the rest of the region — bleaching in successive marine heatwaves, stony coral tissue loss disease, and hurricane damage that in Barbuda’s case removed large areas of structure outright.
Codrington Lagoon National Park protects the frigatebird colony and the mangrove behind it. Mangrove is the underrated part of this system: it is nursery habitat for reef fish, a carbon store, and — as Irma demonstrated across the region — the most effective coastal defence available, absorbing storm surge that would otherwise reach settlements. Replanting has become a serious part of the recovery.
Antigua has also been an unusually loud voice in international climate negotiation for a country of ninety thousand people, and has co-led the small-island push for loss-and-damage finance — the argument that states which contributed almost nothing to emissions should not be borrowing at commercial rates to rebuild from their consequences.
Standing on the seventeen empty kilometres of Barbuda’s west beach, with the frigatebirds circling behind and a half-built resort somewhere down the shoreline, the abstraction becomes fairly concrete.
Mia has reported from thirty-one Asian countries over twelve years, with a soft spot for the ones without a metro. Her temple-conservation series was shortlisted for the Amnesty Media Award. She travels by night train whenever one exists.