Belize » Introduction of Belize City

Diverse is the most appropriate term for Belize’s amazingly blended population. Majority of the population is Black Creole, followed by Mestizos with a sprinkling of the Mayan descendants and the Garifunas. Black Creoles are descendants of the African slaves and British baymen, while Mestizos are refugees from the surrounding state of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador.

Wedged between Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize is a sliver of land on the Caribbean Sea. Along its coastline are 400 cayes, some no larger than a tennis court. In the Maya Mountains the central highlands that form the watershed for Belize's thousands of streams and rivers there is dense rain forest; in the north, savannas and fields of sugarcane. Because it has the lowest population density of any Central American nation El Salvador, though a smaller country, has 10 times the population most of this green interior is still the province of scarlet macaws, tapirs, kinkajous, pumas, and howler monkeys.

Even reduced to vapid statistics 550 species of birds, some 300 varieties of orchids, hundreds of butterfly species the sheer variety of Belize's wildlife is breathtaking. The same goes for its nearly 600 Mayan ruins, which range from the metropolitan splendor of Caracol to the humble burial mounds sprinkled throughout the countryside.