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Antigua is an island in the West Indies, in the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean region, the main island of the country of Antigua and Barbuda. Antigua means “ancient” in Spanish and was named by Christopher Columbus after a church in Spain, Santa Maria La Antigua — St. Mary the Ancient. It is also known as Wadadli, from the original Amerindian inhabitants, and means approximately “our own”.

• Antigua & Barbuda National Anthem
• Antigua & Barbuda National Flag
• Antigua & Barbuda National Symbol

An enterprising man, Codrington came to Antigua to flourish the large-scale sugar cultivation that already flourished elsewhere in the Caribbean. Over the next fifty years sugar cultivation on Antigua exploded. By the middle of the 18th century the island was dotted with more than 150 cane-processing windmills representing a sizeable plantation.

Most Antiguans are of African lineage, descendants of slaves brought to the island centuries ago to labor in the sugarcane fields. However, Antigua’s history of habitation extends as far back as two and a half millenia before Christ. The first settlements, ( 2400 B.C.) were those of the Siboney (an Arawak word meaning “stone-people”), peripatetic Meso-Indians whose beautifully crafted shell and stone tools have been found at dozens of sites around the island. After the Siboney moved on, Antigua was settled by the pastoral, agricultural Arawaks (35-1100 A.D.), who were then displaced by the Caribs.

Antigua became an important strategic port at the end of the 18th century  as well as a valuable commercial colony. Known as the “gateway to the Caribbean,” it was situated in a position that offered control over the major sailing routes to and from the region’s rich island colonies.

During William’s reign, in 1834,  Britain abolished slavery in the empire.  Antigua instituted immediate full emancipation rather than a four-year ‘apprenticeship,’ (waiting period) and todays Antigua’s Carnival festivities commemorate the earliest abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean.

Emancipation actually improved the island’s economy but until the development of tourism in the past few decades, Antiguans struggled for prosperity.

The rise of a strong labour movement in the 1940s, under the leadership of V.C. Bird, provided the impetus for independence.

In 1967, with Barbuda and the tiny island of Redonda as dependencies, Antigua became an associated state of the Commonwealth, and in 1981 it achieved full independent status.

The island’s circumference is roughly 87 km (54 mi) and its area 281 km2 (108 sq mi). Its population is about 69,000 as of July 2006.[1] It is the largest of the Leeward Islands, and the most developed and prosperous due to its upscale tourism industry, offshore banking, internet gambling services and education services, including two medical schools.