Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is the Caribbean island that two empires could not stop fighting over. The British and French traded control of this small volcanic island fourteen times between 1660 and 1814, and the result is a place where people speak English officially but Saint Lucian Creole at home, where villages have French names and cricket is the national passion, and where the culture is an intoxicating blend of both colonial legacies with deep African and Caribbean roots.

The island's most famous landmarks are the Pitons - twin volcanic spires rising dramatically from the sea near Soufriere, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most photographed landscapes in the Caribbean. But Saint Lucia's most remarkable statistic has nothing to do with scenery: this island of fewer than 200,000 people has produced two Nobel Prize winners, giving it the highest ratio of Nobel laureates to population of any country on Earth. Sir Arthur Lewis won for Economics and Derek Walcott for Literature. For a tiny island in the eastern Caribbean, that is an extraordinary intellectual achievement.