Cayman Islands Geography, Climate & Nature

The Cayman Islands are three islands of marine limestone and dolomite uplifted in the late Miocene, low-lying and ringed by coral reef, in the western Caribbean south of Cuba and north-east of Honduras, between Jamaica and the Yucatán: 264 square kilometres of land with 160 kilometres of coastline. George Town, the capital, is 438 kilometres south of Havana and 504 north-west of Kingston. Grand Cayman is the largest and, unlike most Caribbean islands, flat for the most part, with the Central Mangrove Wetland covering 17.8 per cent of it and the North Sound, where the stingray sandbars lie, opening off its north coast; its five districts are Bodden Town, East End, George Town, North Side and West Bay, with Seven Mile Beach on the west.

The Sister Islands lie about 145 kilometres to the north-east: Cayman Brac, 19 kilometres long and two wide, with the Bluff, a limestone outcrop rising along the island to 43 metres at its eastern end, the territory's most prominent terrain; and Little Cayman, eight kilometres west of the Brac, 28.5 square kilometres, 16 kilometres long and 1.6 wide, generally low, with the Booby Pond Ramsar reserve.

The islands sit in an active seismic area and get earthquakes, most of them unnoticed, and in the Atlantic hurricane belt; there are no rivers, and the botanic park's lake dries in the dry season for want of one.

The Cayman Islands have a tropical wet and dry climate with little seasonal change in temperature: a wet season from May to October and a dry season from November to April. The major natural hazard is the tropical cyclones of the Atlantic hurricane season from June to November, and the islands' flatness makes them vulnerable: Hurricane Ivan on 11 September 2004, the worst in 86 years, drove an eight-foot storm surge across Grand Cayman, which lies largely unprotected at sea level. The islands are also in an active seismic area, though most tremors pass unnoticed.

The British advisory points to the government's free National Emergency Notification System app, which sends alerts by e-mail, text and notification, and to the weather services' updates during the season. No temperature figures are repeated here; the sources give the pattern rather than the numbers.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

The Cayman Islands' biodiversity is a reef ecosystem around a limestone platform and the wetlands and dry forest on top of it. The Central Mangrove Wetland covers 17.8 per cent of Grand Cayman; the Booby Pond Nature Reserve on Little Cayman is an 82-hectare Ramsar site with its rookery, and Preston Bay there is a protected nesting beach for Sister Islands rock iguanas and sea turtles; Cayman Brac's Bluff and Grand Cayman's woodland trail in the botanic park hold the dry forest, with the rare native cockspur tree and bull thatch palm along a trail of about 40 acres.

The blue iguana, endemic to Grand Cayman and endangered, was down to fewer than fifteen wild animals by 2003 and has been bred and released by the hundreds since 2004 into a preserve run by a partnership led by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust; the botanic park's iguana habitat is where visitors see it. The turtles that named the islands were hunted to near-extinction after 1503, and the Turtle Centre in West Bay, founded in 1968 as a farm for green sea turtles, is the contested modern answer. The southern stingrays of the North Sound sandbars are wild animals whose feeding by tour boats has raised documented concern.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The animals a visitor is almost certain to meet are the southern stingrays of the North Sound sandbars, which gather where the boats feed them and can be touched in three feet of water; the blue iguanas of the botanic park on Grand Cayman and the rock iguanas of the Sister Islands; the boobies and frigatebirds of Little Cayman's Booby Pond; the green sea turtles of the Turtle Centre; and the reef fish and corals of the walls off all three islands, the Bloody Bay wall on Little Cayman the most famous. The parrots of Cayman Brac and Grand Cayman are in the islands but no sentence opened for this page counts them, so they are named and not numbered.

The practical zoology is the advisories' and the tourism department's: Zika and dengue from mosquitoes, no removal of marine life, and stingrays whose behaviour has been changed by feeding.