San Andrés is the largest island in Colombia, and the strangest piece of the country. It sits in the Caribbean Sea about 750 km from the Colombian mainland, far out near Nicaragua. Look at a map and it seems to belong to Central America. It belongs to Colombia.
People call it the sea of seven colors. From a landing plane the water shows band after band of colour, from deep green to pale aqua, the work of the coral reefs below. It is a small coral island, and you can drive its one loop road in under an hour.
The Raizal
The native people of San Andrés are the Raizal. They are Afro-Caribbean and Protestant, descended from enslaved Africans and from Jamaican settlers who came starting in the 1600s. Their language is an English-based Creole, close to the Creole spoken in Bluefields in Nicaragua, Limón in Costa Rica, and Bocas del Toro and Colón in Panama. The same people and the same speech run all along this coast.
For most of the island's history the Raizal were the whole population. From the mid-1900s the Colombian government encouraged Spanish-speaking mainlanders to move there. Today the Raizal are about a third of some 75,000 people, and Spanish is now heard as much as English and Creole.
Pirates and powers
The island was fought over from the start. The English and the Spanish both wanted it in the 1600s, and it changed hands more than once. It became a pirate base, raided by English and French crews, and the famous privateer Henry Morgan worked these waters. Spain held it in the end, and in 1821 it passed to Colombia.
The fight over the sea
Because the island lies so close to Nicaragua, the two countries long argued over who owned it. A 1928 treaty gave the islands to Colombia. Nicaragua later challenged it, and the case went to the International Court of Justice. In 2012 the court ruled that the islands are Colombian, but it handed much of the surrounding sea to Nicaragua. The land is settled. The water around it is still sore.
The island today
San Andrés is a Caribbean island that happens to be Colombian. You hear English, Creole, and Spanish in the same street. The food is Caribbean: the island dish is rondón, a slow stew of fish and coconut milk, the same dish found down the coast in Limón and Bocas del Toro. The music is calypso, soca, and reggae. A duty-free island, it draws Colombians by the planeload, but under the resorts the Raizal Caribbean is still the heart of it.