Guadeloupe
Guadeloupe is an overseas department and region of the French Republic in the Caribbean. It consists of six inhabited islands—Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre, Marie-Galante, La Désirade, and two Îles des Saintes—as well as many uninhabited islands and outcroppings. It is south of Antigua and Barbuda and Montserrat and north of Dominica. The capital city is Basse-Terre, on the southern west coast of Basse-Terre Island; the most populous city is Les Abymes and the main centre of business is neighbouring Pointe-à-Pitre, both on Grande-Terre Island. It had a population of 395,726 in 2024.
Like the other overseas departments, it is an integral part of France. As a constituent territory of the European Union and the eurozone, the euro is its official currency and any EU citizen is free to settle and work there indefinitely, but it is not part of the Schengen Area. It included Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin until 2007, when they were detached from Guadeloupe following a 2003 referendum.
Christopher Columbus visited Guadeloupe in 1493 and gave the island its name, after Guadalupe, Cáceres. The native langage is Guadeloupean Creole known as "Kréyòl Gwadloup"; the official language is French, spoken by 84% of the population.
Etymology
The archipelago was called Karukera by the native Arawak people.Christopher Columbus named the island Santa María de Guadalupe in 1493 after Our Lady of Guadalupe, a shrine to the Virgin Mary venerated in the Spanish town of Guadalupe, Extremadura. When the area became a French colony, the Spanish name was retained – though altered to French orthography and phonology. The islands are locally known as Gwada.
History
Pre-colonial era
The islands were first populated by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, possibly as far back as 3000 BC. The Arawak people are the first identifiable group, but they were later displaced by Kalina-Carib peoples.The Morel site in Le Moule, Grande-Terre, is one of numerous archaeological sites in Guadeloupe where pre-Columbian artefacts have been found, and is now an archaeological park open to the public. A skeleton found at Morel, sometimes known as the "Woman of Guadeloupe", caused a scientific furore in the 19th century, when initial reports suggested that it dated from the Miocene - long before modern humans are thought to have evolved. However, after examining the specimen and the "stone" that it was embedded in, Georges Cuvier concluded that what had been taken for Miocene stone was a concretion of hardened sand, dating from relatively recent times. Artefacts are still being discovered at the site, and range from 400 BC to 1400 AD.
15th–17th centuries
Christopher Columbus was the first European to see Guadeloupe, landing in November 1493 and giving it its current name. Several attempts at colonisation by the Spanish in the 16th century failed due to Native peoples defending their land from outsiders. In 1626, the French, under the trader and adventurer Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, began to take an interest in Guadeloupe, expelling Spanish settlers. The Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique settled in Guadeloupe in 1635, under the direction of the French colonial leaders Charles Liénard de L'Olive and Jean du Plessis d'Ossonville; they formally stole the island for France and brought in French farmers to colonise the land. This led to the death of many Indigenous people by disease and violence. By 1640, however, the Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique had gone bankrupt, and they thus sold Guadeloupe to Charles Houël du Petit Pré who began plantation agriculture, with the first African slaves arriving in 1650. Slave resistance was immediately widespread, with an open uprising in 1656 lasting several weeks and a simultaneous spate of mass desertions that lasted at least two years until the French compelled indigenous peoples to stop assisting them. Ownership of the island passed to the French West India Company before it was annexed to France in 1674 under the tutelage of their Martinique colony. Institutionalised slavery, enforced by the Code Noir from 1685, led to a booming sugar plantation economy.18th–19th centuries
During the Seven Years' War, British forces captured and occupied the islands until the 1763 Treaty of Paris. During that time, Pointe-à-Pitre became a major harbour, and markets in British America were opened to Guadeloupean sugar, which was traded for foodstuffs and timber. The economy expanded quickly, creating vast wealth for the French colonists. So prosperous was Guadeloupe at the time that, under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France forfeited its Canadian colonies in exchange for the return of Guadeloupe. Coffee planting began in the late 1720s, also worked by slaves and, by 1775, cocoa had become a major export product as well.The French Revolution brought chaos to Guadeloupe. Under new revolutionary law, freedmen were entitled to equal rights. Taking advantage of the chaotic political situation, Britain captured Guadeloupe in 1794. The French responded by sending an expeditionary force under Victor Hugues, which retook the colony by December and abolished slavery. More than 1,000 French colonists were killed in the aftermath.
In 1802, a French expeditionary force under Antoine Richepanse arrived in Guadeloupe, prompting a rebellion led by black officers who had until then been the de facto rulers of the colony. Richepanse and his troops acted quickly against the rebels, culminating in the Battle of Matouba on 28 May 1802. Realising they had no chance of success, Louis Delgrès and his followers committed mass suicide by deliberately exploding their gunpowder stores. A consular decree published on 6 July 1802 discreetly ordered the reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe. An insurgency against the French, who officially reestablished slavery in Guadeloupe on 14 May 1803, continued until 1804. In 1810, the British captured the island again, handing it over to Sweden under the 1813 Treaty of Stockholm.
In the 1814 Treaty of Paris, Sweden ceded Guadeloupe to France, giving rise to the Guadeloupe Fund. In 1815, the Treaty of Vienna acknowledged French control of Guadeloupe.
Slavery was abolished in the French Empire in 1848, though the island's landed interests imposed strict regulations on the rights of emancipated slaves to "support themselves as subsistence farmers, work irregularly, and to change jobs freely". After 1854, indentured labourers from the French colony of Pondicherry, and, with permission from the British government, India more broadly, were brought in: some 41,000 total. Emancipated slaves had the vote from 1849, but French nationality and the vote were not granted to Indian citizens until 1923, when a long campaign, led by Henry Sidambarom, finally achieved success.
20th–21st centuries
In 1936, Félix Éboué became the first black governor of Guadeloupe. During World War II, Guadeloupe initially came under the control of the Vichy government, later joining Free France in 1943. In 1946, the colony of Guadeloupe became an overseas department of France.Tensions arose in the post-war era over the social structure of Guadeloupe and its relationship with mainland France. The 'Massacre of St Valentine' occurred in 1952, when striking factory workers in Le Moule were shot at by the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, resulting in four deaths. In May 1967 racial tensions exploded into rioting following a racist attack on a black Guadeloupean, Raphael Balzinc, resulting in eight deaths.
An independence movement grew in the 1970s, prompting France to declare Guadeloupe a French region in 1974. The Union populaire pour la libération de la Guadeloupe campaigned for complete independence, and by the 1980s the situation had turned violent with the actions of groups such as and Alliance révolutionnaire caraïbe.
Greater autonomy was granted to Guadeloupe in 1982. Through a referendum in 2003, Saint-Martin and Saint Barthélemy voted to separate from the administrative jurisdiction of Guadeloupe, this being fully enacted by 2007.
In January 2009, labour unions and others known as the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon went on strike for more pay. Strikers were angry with low wages, the high cost of living, high levels of poverty relative to mainland France and levels of unemployment that are amongst the worst in the European Union. The situation quickly escalated, exacerbated by what was seen as an ineffectual response by the French government, turning violent and prompting the deployment of extra police after a union leader was shot and killed. The strike lasted 44 days and had also inspired similar actions on nearby Martinique. President Nicolas Sarkozy later visited the island, promising reform. Tourism suffered greatly during this time and affected the 2010 tourist season as well.
Geography
Guadeloupe is an archipelago of more than 12 islands, as well as islets and rocks situated where the northeastern Caribbean Sea meets the western Atlantic Ocean. It is located in the Leeward Islands in the northern part of the Lesser Antilles, a partly volcanic island arc. To the north lie Antigua and Barbuda and the British Overseas Territory of Montserrat, with Dominica lying to the south.The two main islands are Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre, which form a butterfly shape as viewed from above, the two 'wings' of which are separated by the, Rivière Salée and. More than half of Guadeloupe's land surface consists of the 847.8 km2 Basse-Terre. The island is mountainous, containing the peaks of Mount Sans Toucher and Grande Découverte, culminating in the active volcano La Grande Soufrière, the highest mountain peak in the Lesser Antilles with an elevation of. In contrast Grande-Terre is mostly flat, with rocky coasts to the north, irregular hills at the centre, mangrove at the southwest, and white sand beaches sheltered by coral reefs along the southern shore. This is where the main tourist resorts are found.
Marie-Galante is the third-largest island, followed by La Désirade, a north-east slanted limestone plateau, the highest point of which is. To the south lie the Îles de Petite-Terre, which are two islands totalling 2 km2.
Les Saintes is an archipelago of eight islands of which two, Terre-de-Bas and Terre-de-Haut are inhabited. The landscape is similar to that of Basse-Terre, with volcanic hills and irregular shoreline with deep bays.
There are numerous other smaller islands.