Columbus was the first tourist to find the Caribbean too big to describe. In his journal, island after island is the "fairest ever seen" and the "loveliest beheld". More than 500 years later, it's still true.

It's more than seas that are every shade of blue and green, and beaches than range from pearl-gray through pink and amber and cream to sugar-white. The islands of the Caribbean are, some of them, coral limestone, with sweeps of sand, bluffs with green crowns, and rolling landscape. Others are volcanic with soaring mountains, lush vegetation, small, rapid rivers and bridal-veil waterfalls. Most are a combination of both. Some of our countries border the Caribbean but reach back to the American continent with its majestic mountain ranges, vast savannahs, huge rivers and steep escarpments. There is truly a landscape for everyone -- both the camera buff and the visitor whose finest lens is memory.

Hollywood has filmed in the Caribbean since the 1920's not just for its beauty, but because of its many faces. On endless fields of sugar cane the 'green flash' can be seen as the sun goes down. There are rolling grasslands with tidy clumps of trees and stone walls that look like England, and spare landscapes that could be in America's desert southwest, where orchids grow on cactus plants. Tree ferns in rain forests rise to heights of New Zealand immensity; at seaside, the water can carve incredible natural formations, and in mountains higher than any east of the Rockies the mist descends as if you were in Scotland.

Man has added, too. European colonizers amazed at the rich earth brought from around the world the biggest variety of flowering shrubs and trees ever assembled; homesick, they re-created replicas of home, from Dutch facades painted in ice-cream colors, to elegant Georgian cut-stone buildings with branching breezeways, to intricate French wrought-iron balconies and graceful Spanish courtyards. In transition, it all became Caribbean.

There's literally no end to the many-sided beauty of the Caribbean. Our websites can give only a small hint, but we can make a bigger promise: you will not escape it.