Cayman Islands discovery guide

The Cayman Islands are the Caribbean at its most orderly and its most expensive. They are three flat coral islands with the region's highest standard of living, a beach that is public for its whole length, and stingrays that come to your knees on a sandbar. There are wall dives off all three islands, and a crime rate both advisories call very low.

The main travel issue

The price, set by a tax-free financial centre and a luxury-market tourist trade; the cruise days from Tuesday to Friday, when George Town's harbour fills with tenders; a Sunday when much closes; and a drug law with a 35-year ceiling.

The solution

Skip the west-coast strip for the East End or North Side, and take the twenty-minute flight to Cayman Brac or Little Cayman, where the population is counted in hundreds. Go to the botanic park for the blue iguanas, and dive the walls with an operator who will not feed the fish.

January–February -- the dry season, the sea calmest on the west coast, the cruise calendar full from Tuesday to Friday; the coolest, most expensive weeks.

March–April -- the end of the dry season, the best visibility for the walls, and the botanic park's orchid show; still peak prices.

May–June -- the wet season begins and the hurricane season opens in June; fewer visitors, warmer water, the first rains.

July–August -- hot and humid, the North American school-holiday crowd on Seven Mile Beach, storms possible.

September–October -- the heart of the hurricane season, when Ivan came in 2004; the quietest and cheapest weeks, with the government's emergency app worth installing.

November–December -- the season ends in November and the dry months return; the islands fill again from mid-December.

If you travel slowly

Base on Little Cayman, 28.5 square kilometres and the least populated of the three, for the Bloody Bay wall and the Booby Pond Ramsar reserve; or on Cayman Brac under its Bluff, 19 kilometres long and two wide. Both are a short flight from Grand Cayman and a different century.

If you want to see the essentials

Seven Mile Beach, walked end to end because it is public; the stingray sandbars of the North Sound, in water three feet deep; the Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park in North Side, opened in 1994, for its blue iguana habitat, orchid boardwalk and woodland trail; Pedro St James in the south; and George Town's waterfront on a day without ships.

If you seek local character

The Caymanian half of the population is a seafaring people whose livelihood was fishing, turtling and the merchant marine before the banks came; the churches -- 67 per cent of the islands are Christian, and Sunday still closes shops -- the East End villages and the district of Bodden Town are where that Cayman remains.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

The Central Mangrove Wetland that covers 17.8 per cent of Grand Cayman; the East End reef where the Ten Sail wrecked in 1794; the Sister Islands' rock iguanas and turtle nesting at Preston Bay on Little Cayman; and the phosphate ruins of Little Cayman's brief 19th-century industry.

The Cayman Islands are a country that was poor and remote for four centuries and rich for sixty years, and both halves are still visible. The old Cayman was turtlers, fishermen and merchant seamen on three low islands with no rivers, a reef, a Sunday and a legend that the King had freed them from tax for rescuing the crews of the Ten Sail in 1794; the new Cayman is a financial centre with more than 92,000 registered companies and some 600 banks by 2014, no direct taxation, a GDP per head of nearly US$98,000 and a population more than half of which comes from elsewhere -- 140 countries, Jamaica first at a quarter of the total.

The two coexist by a strict etiquette. The islands are 67 per cent Christian and religion and family, the British advisory notes, are of significant cultural importance: shops, banks and services close on Sundays, public nudity including topless sunbathing is prohibited, and businesses ask for shoes and a cover-up. Drugs of any kind can bring 35 years. Same-sex civil partnerships have been legal since 2020 and hotels are welcoming, though local attitudes are conservative.

The manners are British-Caribbean and polite; the money is American, used interchangeably with the Cayman dollar; and the visitor who behaves as if on a quiet island rather than a tax haven is treated well.

The Cayman Islands' environment is a reef and a wetland on a limestone platform, and both are under pressure from a million visitors a year. The rules are the Department of Tourism's and the law's: visitors may fish catch-and-release from shore only and may not remove any marine life; corals and shells stay where they are; and the stingray sandbars, where tour boats feed the animals by hand, are the subject of documented concern about the rays' behaviour and ecology, so choose an operator who does not feed them.

On land, the blue iguana is the emblem of what care can do: endemic to Grand Cayman, fewer than fifteen in the wild in 2003, and now hundreds released from captive breeding into a preserve since 2004; the botanic park's CI$20 admission funds that habitat. The Central Mangrove Wetland, 17.8 per cent of Grand Cayman, is the island's nursery and storm buffer, and Ivan's eight-foot surge in 2004 is the argument for keeping it.

Spend on the Sister Islands and in the East End, where the Caymanian economy is thinnest, and fly rather than cruise: the ships anchor off George Town four days a week and their passengers spend hours, not nights.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Year-round relative cost index vs country average

Higher — Seven Mile Beach and West Bay; December to April

Average — George Town, Bodden Town, the Sister Islands

Lower — the East End and North Side, and anywhere in September and October

Park admission and the taxi rules are the operators' own; taxi fares, bus fares, dive and attraction prices are not stated because no readable authority page prints them, and the relative bands are editorial judgment.