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The Virgin Islands are an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea.
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Virgin Islands or Virgin Island may also refer to:
The Virgin Islands are an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea.
Virgin Islands or Virgin Island may also refer to:
The British Virgin Islands (BVI), officially the Virgin Islands, are a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean, to the east of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands and north-west of Anguilla. The islands are geographically part of the Virgin Islands archipelago and are located in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles and part of the West Indies.
A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. Though dominated by the foreign colonizers, the rule remains separate to the original country of the colonizers, the metropolitan state, which together have often been organized as colonial empires, particularly with the development of modern imperialism and its colonialism. This coloniality and possibly colonial administrative separation, while often blurred, makes colonies neither annexed or integrated territories nor client states. Colonies contemporarily are identified and organized as not sufficiently self-governed dependent territories. Other past colonies have become either sufficiently incorporated and self-governed, or independent, with some to a varying degree dominated by remaining colonial settler societies or neocolonialism.
The United States Virgin Islands, officially the Virgin Islands of the United States, are a group of Caribbean islands and an unincorporated and organized territory of the United States. The islands are geographically part of the Virgin Islands archipelago and are located in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles.
The Virgin Islands are an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. They are geologically and biogeographically the easternmost part of the Greater Antilles, While the BVI is actually “The Virgin Islands”, the name is often used to refer to the entire group of Islands, with the northern islands belonging to the Puerto Rico Trench and St. Croix being a displaced part of the same geologic structure. Politically, the British Virgin Islands have been governed as the western island group of the Leeward Islands, which are the northern part of the Lesser Antilles, and form the border between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The archipelago is separated from the true Lesser Antilles by the Anegada Passage and from the main island of Puerto Rico by the Virgin Passage.
The History of the British Virgin Islands is usually, for convenience, broken up into five separate periods:
The Danish West Indies or Danish Virgin Islands or Danish Antilles were a Danish colony in the Caribbean, consisting of the islands of Saint Thomas with 32 square miles (83 km2); Saint John with 19 square miles (49 km2); and Saint Croix with 84 square miles (220 km2). The islands have belonged to the United States as the Virgin Islands since they were purchased in 1917. Water Island was part of the Danish West Indies until 1905, when the Danish state sold it to the East Asiatic Company, a private shipping company.
Denmark and the former real union of Denmark–Norway had a colonial empire from the 17th through the 20th centuries, large portions of which were found in the Americas. Denmark and Norway in one form or another also maintained land claims in Greenland since the 13th century, the former up through the twenty-first century.
Charlotte Amalie, located on St. Thomas, is the capital and the largest city of the United States Virgin Islands. It was founded in 1666 as Taphus. In 1691, the town was renamed to Charlotte Amalie after the Danish queen Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Kassel (1650–1714). It has a deep-water harbor that was once a haven for pirates and is now one of the busiest ports of call for cruise ships in the Caribbean, with about 1.5 million-plus cruise ship passengers landing there annually. Protected by Hassel Island, the harbor has docking and fueling facilities, machine shops, and shipyards and was a U.S. submarine base until 1966. The Town has been inhabited for centuries. When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493, the area was inhabited by Caribs, Arawaks, Ciboney and Taíno native peoples. It is on the southern shore at the head of Saint Thomas Harbor. In 2010 the City had a population of 18,481, which makes it the largest city in the Virgin Islands Archipelago. Hundreds of ferries and yachts pass by the Town each week.
Saint Croix is an island in the Caribbean Sea, and a county and constituent district of the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincorporated territory of the United States.
The British West Indies (BWI) were colonised British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago. Other territories included Bermuda, and the former British Honduras.
The Commonwealth Caribbean is the region of the Caribbean with English-speaking countries and territories, which once constituted the Caribbean portion of the British Empire and are now part of the Commonwealth of Nations. The term includes many independent island nations, British Overseas Territories and some mainland nations.
The United States Virgin Islands, often abbreviated USVI, are a group of islands and cays located in the Lesser Antilles of the Eastern Caribbean, consisting of three main islands and fifty smaller islets and cays. Like many of their Caribbean neighbors, the history of the islands is characterized by native Amerindian settlement, European colonization, and the Atlantic slave trade.
The coat of arms of the British Virgin Islands consists of a green escutcheon (shield) charged with a woman in a white dress and gold-coloured sandals, holding a lit golden oil lamp and surrounded by eleven other golden lamps. Adopted shortly after the islands became a Crown colony, it has been the coat of arms of the British Virgin Islands since 1960. The escutcheon dates from the early 19th century and is featured on the flag of the territory. The woman and the lamps represent Saint Ursula and her companions, the namesake of the islands.
A colonial empire is a collective of territories, either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.
The Legislature of the Virgin Islands is the territorial legislature of the United States Virgin Islands. The legislative branch of the unincorporated U.S. territory is unicameral, with a single house consisting of 15 senators, elected to two-year terms without term limits. The legislature meets in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas.
The West Indies is a subregion of North America, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island countries and 19 dependencies in three archipelagos: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago.
The seal of the United States Virgin Islands is an official symbol of the United States Virgin Islands.
The Dutch Virgin Islands is the collective name for the enclaves that the Dutch West India Company had in the Virgin Islands. The area was ruled by a director, whose seat was not permanent. The main reason for starting a colony here was that it lay strategically between the Dutch colonies in the south and New Netherland. The Dutch West India Company was mainly affected by the competition from Denmark, England and Spain. In 1680 the remaining islands became a British colony.