Utila is a beautiful tropical island nestling on the edge of the Caribbean sea just of the coast of Honduras.
Utila is is just under 7 miles long and about 2.5 miles wide at its widest. This makes Utila the smallest of the major islands in the Bay Islands.

Utila is surrounded by a fringing coral reef with prolific undersea life. Known as "The Whale Shark Capital of the Caribbean" Utila is a great place to encounter whale sharks because it is one of the few places in world where this huge beautiful fish comes so close to shore.

The islands have a long history - ruins found on all three of the Bay Islands are evidence that they were inhabited well before the Europeans arrived. Christopher Columbus landed in the Bay Islands in 1502 and found a large population of indians. English, French and Dutch pirates used the Bay Islands as a base and would mount raids on the heavy and slow Spanish cargo ships returning to Spain.

Colonization by the Spanish began in the early 1500s and over the next century, the Spanish plundered the island for its slave trade and eliminated the island of Indians by the early 1600s. Britain occupied the Bay Islands on and off between 1550 and 1700.

During this time pirates found the vacated and mostly unprotected Islands a haven for safe harbor and transport. Utila is rich in pirate lore: to this day, scuba divers look for sunken treasure from Captain Morgan's lost treasure from his famous raid on Panama in 1671.

The British were forced to give back the Bay Islands to the Honduran government in the mid 1800s. It was at this time that the nearly uninhabited islands was being seeded by its now Caymanian roots. They remain rich in Caymanian culture and dialect.

Útila. (2007, September 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:31, September 27, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/

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