50 Fun Facts About British Overseas Territories

Until a tunnel opened in 2023, what did Gibraltar's main road to the Spanish border run straight across?

An airport runway cut across Winston Churchill Avenue, so barriers stopped every car whenever a plane landed or took off. Pedestrians can still walk over it between flights.

Jonathan, brought to Saint Helena in 1882 when he was already about fifty years old, is what kind of animal?

A giant tortoise from the Seychelles, Jonathan hatched around 1832, five years before Queen Victoria took the throne. He became the oldest tortoise ever reliably recorded.

Which internet domain, Anguilla's country code, became a windfall for the island in the 2020s tech boom?

.ai is simply Anguilla's country code, but the rush of artificial-intelligence firms to register it was expected to supply nearly half of the island's state income in 2025.

Which defeated ruler was exiled to Saint Helena in 1815 and died there six years later?

Napoleon Bonaparte had already escaped one island exile, on Elba, so after Waterloo Britain chose a speck in the South Atlantic. He spent his last years at Longwood House.

The Bermuda Triangle is usually drawn between Bermuda, San Juan in Puerto Rico and which American city?

Miami was fixed as a corner by a 1964 magazine article titled The Deadly Bermuda Triangle. Lloyd's of London later found that no unusual number of ships had sunk in the area.

Which monkeys roam free on the Rock of Gibraltar, forming the only wild monkey population in Europe?

Barbary macaques are tied by legend to British rule, so when their numbers fell to seven in 1942 Winston Churchill ordered fresh animals shipped in at once.

In the 2013 referendum on whether the Falkland Islands should stay British, how many ballots said no?

3 ballots out of 1,518 went against, which gave a 99.8% majority for remaining a British territory on a turnout of 92%.

The people of Pitcairn Island descend mostly from Tahitians and the mutineers of which Royal Navy ship?

HMS Bounty was set on fire by the nine mutineers soon after they landed in 1790, and what is left of the hull still lies underwater in the bay named after it.

Norman Island in the British Virgin Islands is reputed to have inspired a pirate novel by which Scottish author?

Robert Louis Stevenson published Treasure Island in 1883. Norman Island's legend rests on real loot: chests of silver from a Spanish galleon were buried there in 1750.

The 1609 wreck of the ship Sea Venture on Bermuda is widely thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest was written about a year after the castaways left Bermuda. They had spent nine months there building two small ships to finish their voyage to Virginia.

Which South American country calls the Falkland Islands the Islas Malvinas and claims them as its own?

Argentina uses a name that began in French: the explorer Bougainville called the islands the Îles Malouines in 1764, after Saint-Malo, the port his ships sailed from.

Which British prime minister sent a naval task force to retake the Falkland Islands in April 1982?

Margaret Thatcher dispatched the fleet within days of the invasion, and the 74-day war ended with the islands back in British hands on 14 June.

Which polar explorer, leader of the Endurance expedition, is buried at Grytviken on South Georgia?

Ernest Shackleton died of a heart attack aboard his ship at South Georgia in 1922. His wife asked that he stay on the island instead of being brought home to England.

Which British entrepreneur bought the uninhabited Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands at the age of 28?

Richard Branson bought Necker only six years after starting the Virgin Group, then turned the empty island into a luxury retreat.

Which saint's day is a public holiday on Montserrat, marking a failed slave uprising on that date in 1768?

St Patrick's Day honours the Irish roots behind Montserrat's nickname, the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. The date became a public holiday in 1985 and now anchors a ten-day festival.

Which Beatles producer opened AIR Studios on Montserrat in 1979, drawing stars such as Elton John to record there?

George Martin built the studio near his own island home. It never reopened after Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989, shortly after the Rolling Stones had recorded an album there.

Gibraltar looks across a strait about 14 km wide at its narrowest to which African country?

Morocco faces Gibraltar across the only natural link between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. A vast flood through the gap is thought to have refilled the Mediterranean about 5.3 million years ago.

In ancient legend, the Rock of Gibraltar was one of which pair of landmarks at the edge of the known world?

The Pillars of Hercules marked the mouth of the Mediterranean for Greek and Roman sailors. Which African peak was the southern pillar has been argued over ever since.

Which city has been the capital of Bermuda since 1815, when it took over from the older town of St George's?

Hamilton counted just 854 residents at the 2016 census, which makes it one of the smallest capital cities in the world.

Which Scottish city shares its name with the only settlement on Tristan da Cunha, styled 'of the Seven Seas'?

Edinburgh of the Seven Seas honours not the city but a person: Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a son of Queen Victoria who visited the island in 1867.

The Cayman Islands take their name from a Taíno word for which animal, which once lived there?

Crocodile is the meaning of caiman in the Taíno language. Columbus had first called the islands Las Tortugas, after the turtles that crowded their shores.

Which name belongs to a Grand Cayman tourist spot known for jagged black limestone and a busy post office?

Hell is a patch of black limestone spikes about half the size of a football field, and its bright red post office does a brisk trade in postcards stamped with the name.

Which blue reptile, found wild only on Grand Cayman, had dwindled to fewer than 15 animals by 2003?

Iguana numbers on Grand Cayman climbed back to about 750 by 2012, after hundreds of captive-bred blue iguanas were released into a protected reserve.

Road Town, capital of the British Virgin Islands, stands on which island, the largest in the territory?

Tortola is home to more than four in five of the territory's people. Its name is said to come from the Spanish for turtle dove.

Christopher Columbus named the Virgin Islands in 1493 after the legendary 11,000 virgin companions of which saint?

Saint Ursula gave the islands the full name Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes, a mouthful that was later cut down to the Virgin Islands.

Which settlement on Grand Turk has been the capital of the Turks and Caicos Islands since 1766?

Cockburn Town keeps the government, but far more islanders live on Providenciales, the most populated island in the group.

The Turks Islands are named after which kind of plant, a native species with a red, fez-like cap?

The Turk's cap cactus grows a red crown that resembles the fez worn in the late Ottoman Empire, which is how a Caribbean island chain came to be named after Turks.

Which American astronaut was brought ashore on Grand Turk after orbiting Earth and splashing down nearby in 1962?

John Glenn had spent just under five hours in space aboard Friendship 7, and his capsule came down in the North Atlantic close to the Turks and Caicos.

Both the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos were dependencies of which colony until its 1962 independence?

Jamaica left British rule in August 1962, and both island groups chose to stay behind, becoming separate Crown colonies instead.

Anguilla's long, thin outline earned the island a name that comes from a Latin-rooted word for which fish?

Eel is the meaning of the Italian word anguilla, which goes back to a Latin word for a little snake. The island is about 26 km long and only 5 km across.

Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain during the War of the Spanish Succession under a 1713 treaty named after which city?

The Treaty of Utrecht gave Gibraltar to Britain in perpetuity, nine years after an Anglo-Dutch fleet had captured the Rock in 1704.

The name Gibraltar is a corruption of Jabal Tariq, meaning 'Mount of Tariq', in which language?

Arabic speakers named the Rock after Tariq ibn Ziyad, the general whose army crossed from North Africa in 711 and began the Muslim conquest of Iberia.

After which 1805 sea battle was the crippled HMS Victory towed to Gibraltar with Admiral Nelson's body on board?

Trafalgar left Victory unable to move under her own power, so HMS Neptune towed her to Gibraltar for repairs before the long voyage home to England.

Flora Duffy won Bermuda's first Olympic gold medal at the Tokyo Games in which sport?

Triathlon gold made Bermuda the smallest overseas territory to win an Olympic title. Duffy had raced at three earlier Games before her Tokyo victory.

By law, the white stepped roofs of houses in Bermuda are built to do which practical job?

Collect rainwater: Bermuda has no rivers or freshwater lakes, so the steps slow each shower and steer it through gutters into a household tank.

Which capital of Montserrat was abandoned in 1997 after volcanic eruptions buried it, leaving a ghost town?

Plymouth is still the legal capital although nobody lives there, which makes it the only ghost town serving as the capital of a political territory.

Which animal, long the mainstay of the Falkland Islands' economy, stands on tussock grass on their coat of arms?

Sheep farming for wool was historically the islands' main industry, so a ram tops the shield, above the ship said to have first sighted the islands in 1592.

Which town on East Falkland, named after a Victorian colonial secretary, is the capital of the Falkland Islands?

Stanley became the seat of government in 1845, taking over from Port Louis, the islands' original capital to the north.

Which animals, introduced to South Georgia by Norwegians in 1911 for meat and sport, were wiped out a century later?

Reindeer multiplied until they were damaging the island's native grasses and lichens, so the herds were culled in a programme that ran from 2013 to 2015.

Which atoll in the Chagos Archipelago has hosted a joint UK–US military base since the 1970s?

Diego Garcia was emptied of its people first: between 1968 and 1973 the Chagossian islanders were forcibly removed to make way for the base.

In May 2025 Britain signed a treaty to hand sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to which country?

Mauritius had the islands split off from it in 1965, three years before its own independence, and a 2019 opinion from the International Court of Justice backed its claim.

Which of the UK's overseas possessions is by far the largest by area, though nobody lives there permanently?

British Antarctic Territory is a wedge of ice running all the way to the South Pole, staffed only by research station crews. Two South American countries claim overlapping slices.

The Pitcairn Islands, lying between French Polynesia and Easter Island, are Britain's only territory in which ocean?

The Pacific holds just this one British territory, and only one of its four islands is inhabited: Pitcairn itself, with a permanent population of 35 in 2023.

Pitcairn Islanders date British rule from 1838, when the island was among the first places to give women what?

The right to vote reached Pitcairn's women 55 years before New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant it nationally, in 1893.

Ascension Island's man-made cloud forest was planted on the advice of Joseph Hooker, encouraged by which naturalist?

Charles Darwin had found the island arid and treeless, yet by the late 1870s shipped-in pines, eucalyptus and bamboo were thriving on its highest peak, Green Mountain.

Who ran Saint Helena for most of the time from the 1650s until the Crown took over in 1834?

The East India Company prized the island as a port of call where ships sailing home from Asia could take on water and provisions and gather into convoys.

Akrotiri and Dhekelia, Britain's base areas on Cyprus, are the only British-ruled land to use which currency?

The euro arrived in January 2008, when the bases followed the Republic of Cyprus in giving up the Cypriot pound.

Which capital of Saint Helena shares its name with the first permanent English settlement in North America?

Jamestown grew up around a fort in a narrow valley between steep cliffs and was named in honour of the Duke of York, the future King James II.

Which island, like Jersey and Guernsey, is a Crown Dependency and not a British Overseas Territory?

The Isle of Man is self-governing under the Crown, and its parliament, Tynwald, is claimed to be the oldest continuously governing body in the world.

Anguilla rebelled in 1967 against being governed together with which pair of islands, ejecting their police force?

Saint Kitts and Nevis lost Anguilla for good: the islanders declared a republic, 300 British troops landed in 1969, and formal separation followed in 1980.