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Friday 11th October
St Vincent & Grenadines Facts
The highest point in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is Soufriere (1,234 m).

St Vincent and the Grenadines belongs to a group of Caribbean islands known as the Windward Islands.

The Windward Islands include the islands of Grenada, Martinique, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

The administration of the islands of the Grenadines group is divided between St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada.

Bequia is the largest of the Grenadine islands. Other islands include Canouan, Mayreau, Mustique, Tobago Cays, Palm Island, Petit St. Vincent and Union Island.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to sight St Vincent. He named the island after St Vincent's Day.

Petroglyphs in Layou were carved by Ciboney Amerindians who lived on the island of St Vincent thousands of years ago.

The Treaty of Versailles ceded St Vincent to the Great Britain in 1783.

The British grew sugarcane on St Vincent. African slaves were brought to the island to work on the plantations.

Breadfruit was introduced to St Vincent by Captain William Bligh on his return from Tahiti in 1793. On his first voyage to collect breadfruit, Bligh was forced off the HMS Bounty by mutineers near Tonga in the South Pacific.

The Botanical Gardens in St Vincent were founded in 1762 and are the oldest botanical gardens in this part of the world. A descendant of one of the first breadfruit trees from the Pacific can be seen in the Gardens.

Following an uprising in the 1790s five thousand Carib people were deported to the island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras.

The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807) prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire. (Slaves in the British colonies did not gain their freedom until the 1830s. The 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act began the process leading to emancipation).

Indentured labour from India worked on the plantations after the emancipation of the slaves.

A number of Portuguese traders and shopkeepers arrived in St Vincent in the nineteenth century.

The Soufriere volcano erupted in 1718, 1812 and again 1902. There were a number of casualties in the first eruption and two thousand people died in 1902. A further eruption occurred in 1979.

On 9th April 2021 a mass evacuation was ordered from St Vincent following signs of an imminent eruption of the Soufriere volcano.

In 1969 St Vincent was internal granted self-government; independence was gained in 1979.

St Vincent and the Grenadines is a member of the Commonwealth.

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