Flight to Belize City

Belize City

About Belize City

Belize City is the largest city of the Central American nation Belize. It is not the capital of the Belize District.

Unofficial estimates place the population of Belize City at 70,800 or more people. It is located at the mouth of the Belize River on the coast of the Caribbean Sea. Belize City is the nation's principal port and its financial and industrial hub. Several cruise ships drop anchor outside the port and are tended by local citizens. The city was almost entirely destroyed in 1961 when Hurricane Hattie swept ashore on Halloween. It was the capital of British Honduras (as Belize was then named) until the government was moved to the new capital of Belmopan in 1970.

Belize City's sister city in the United States is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

History

Belize City was founded (originally as "Belize Town") in the mid-17th century by British lumber harvesters. It had previously been a small Mayan city called Holzuz.

Belize Town was ideal for the British as a central post because it was on the sea and a natural outlet for local rivers and creeks down which the British shipped logwood and mahogany. Belize Town also became the home of the thousands of African slaves brought in by the British to assist in the forest industry. It was the coordination site for the 1798 Battle of St. George's Caye, won by the British against would-be invaders, and the home of the local courts and government officials up to the 1970s. For this reason, historians often say that "the capital was the Colony", because the center of British control was here.

Belize

About Belize

Belize (pronounced /b?'li?z/) is a country in Central America. It is the only officially English speaking country in the region. A British colony for more than a century, it was known as British Honduras until 1973, and became an independent nation in 1981. Belize is a member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Sistema de Integración Centroamericana (SICA), and the Commonwealth of Nations. With 8,867 square miles (22,960 km²) of territory and 297,651 people (Belize CSO, 2007 mid year estimate), the population density is the lowest in the Central American region and one of the lowest in the world. The country's growth rate is 3.5% (2006 estimate). It is bordered to the south and west by Guatemala, to the north and northwest by Mexico and to the east by the Caribbean Sea.

History

The Mopan Maya, were the original inhabitants of Belize. The Maya civilization spread itself over Belize beginning around 1500 BC, and flourished until about AD 900. European settlement began with the Baymen, British pirates, privateers and English seamen as early as 1638.

The origin of the name Belize is unclear, but one idea is that the name is from the Maya word belix, meaning "muddy water", applied to the Belize River. A less likely idea is that it derives from the Spanish pronunciation of the surname of the pirate who created the first settlement in Belize in 1638, Peter Wallace.

Another account believes the early settlement of "Belize in the Bay of Honduras" grew from a few habitations located at Belize Town and St. George's Caye into a de-facto colony of the United Kingdom during the late 18th century. In the early 19th century the settlement was called British Honduras, and in 1871 it became a Crown Colony.

Taking advantage of Spain's inability to establish control over present-day Belize, Englishmen began to cut logwood, a dyewood greatly valued in Europe as the principal dyestuff for the expanding wool industry. By the 1770s, a second tropical exotic timber, mahogany, replaced logwood as the main export from Belize. The economy of Belize remained based on the extraction of mahogany until the early 1900s when the cultivation of export crops such as citrus fruits, sugar cane, and bananas came to dominate the economy.

Hurricane Hattie inflicted significant damage upon Belize in 1961. The government decided that a coastal capital city lying below sea level was too risky. Over several years, the British colonial government designed a new capital, Belmopan, at the exact geographical centre of the country, and in 1970 began slowly moving the governing offices there.