Grand Turk travel guide

Grand Turk is not a resort island although there are a few hotels and dive operations that concentrate mostly on the wall just off the west coast. It is a wonderfully laid-back place to come for a holiday but the atmosphere may change with the advent of cruise ships to the new dock in the south which started in 2004 with the signing of a 30-year contract with Carnival. Several times a month a cruise ship dwarfs Cockburn Town and disgorges the equivalent of the island’s population to visit the sights. The vegetation is mostly scrub and cactus, and wild donkeys and horses roam freely. Behind the town and around the island are old salt pans, with crumbling walls and ruined windmills, where pelicans and other waterbirds fish. The east coast is often littered with tree trunks and other debris which have drifted across from Africa, lending credence to the claim that Columbus could have been carried here, rather than further north in the Bahamas chain. There are great sea views from the 1852 lighthouse at the extreme north of the island. Grand Turk is the seat of government and the second-largest population centre, although it has an area of only 7 square miles.