Below you will find information about the climate and the best time to travel to the Caribbean holiday destination. We divide the destination into the following regions: Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts Nevis, Sint Eustatius, Saba, St. Maarten, Saint-Barthélemy, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Turks and Caicos Islands, Jamaica, Cuba, Bahamas and Cayman Islands. See list of countries in Caribbean.
In the following you will find a quick overview of the climate of all regions, you can also switch to the respective detail pages where you can find precise climate information including climate tables and diagrams for temperatures, precipitation and more.
In addition, we have evaluated all measured values and give a recommendation for each region of the Caribbean travel destination which months are best for a vacation from a climatic point of view.
General and geography
According to abbreviationfinder, the Caribbean is a popular holiday region in the tropical west of the Atlantic. The area is counted to Central America and covers an area of about 220,000 square kilometers in the so-called Caribbean Sea.
The Caribbean stretches from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula in a triangle down to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago off the coast of Venezuela in South America.
According to current estimates, around 42 million people live on the Caribbean islands, of which around 70% use Spanish and around 25% English as their main language. In addition to French and Dutch, numerous dialects and mixed languages of Creole and Caribbean are represented.
The largest Caribbean islands are Cuba and Hispaniola, on which the two neighboring states Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located. Followed by the Bahamas, Jamaica and Puerto Rico as well as the sister islands Trinidad and Tobago.
The Caribbean is generally divided into the following areas: Greater Antilles (including Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic), Lesser Antilles (including Barbados, Martinique, St. Lucia, Curaçao), the Open Atlantic (including Bahamas, Turks and Caicos) and the western Caribbean (including Cozumel in Mexico).
Climate in the Caribbean
Due to the large extent of the Caribbean, there are regional differences, especially with regard to wind conditions and the risk of hurricanes. Basically, the climate of the Caribbean can be described as tropical to subtropical. There are therefore only minor temperature fluctuations and no ordinary seasons.
For most of the Caribbean islands, the European winter and spring are the ideal travel times. We have broken down the individual climate tables and information on the best travel time for each individual island separately and in great detail.
Francophone Caribbean literature
The French-speaking Caribbean literature was subject to the conditions of origin that were comparable to Anglophone Caribbean literature, but due to the different historical developments in the French colonies, different literary traditions also emerged.
In Haiti as early as the 19th century, with reference to the independence achieved in 1804, a national self-image could develop, which manifested itself in the essay as well as in the poetry and in the drama, but which, despite all patriotism, remained committed to the French understanding of culture. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that critical voices were heard complaining about the failure of the national project in view of the political instability – for example in the novels by Frédéric Marcelin (* 1848, † 1917) and Justin Lhérisson (* 1873, † 1907), the tried to counteract the alienation caused by the French cultural influence with reference to the African cultural heritage. The ethnologist J. Price-Mars provided the decisive impetuswith his volume of essays “Ainsi parla l’oncle” published in 1928; numerous indigenist novels followed, including by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (* 1904, † 1975) and Pierre Marcelin (* 1908, † 1983), in which the depiction of rural life, including the previously tabooed magical practices of voodoo, is in the foreground.
The two most important Haitian authors succeeded in overcoming this rather folkloric indigenism: J. Roumain, who in his novel “Gouverneurs de la rosée” (published in 1944; German “Herr über den Tau”), who is considered a national epic, firmly addresses the concerns of the indigenists political statement connected, and J. S. Alexis, who founded the Haitian “magical realism” in his works on the inclusion of the mythical-magical worldview of voodoo.
The dictatorship of the Duvalier family forced the critical authors into exile from the early 1960s. R. Depestre, Anthony Phelps (* 1928), Gérard Étienne (* 1936, † 2008), Jean Métellus (* 1937, † 2014) and Émile Ollivier (* 1940, † 2002), who publish in French or Canada in French while in Haiti itself – for example through the novelist Frankétienne (* 1936) and the poet Georges Castera (* 1936) - Creole gained in importance.
In Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana, it was not until the Négritude movement that emerged in Paris in the 1930s that a turn away from the previously propagated romantic, transfigured view of the Caribbean world as a tropical paradise. The decisive factor was the influence of A. Césaire - especially with his poem “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (1939) – and L.-G. Damaswith his collection of poems “Pigments” (1937), which propagated a new “black” self-confidence by returning to African roots. However, with the transformation of the French colonies into French overseas departments, which probably raised the standard of living, but also resulted in a largely cultural assimilation to the metropolis, the current situation came into the focus of critical intellectuals. The most important literary work of this time, J. Zobel’s novel “La Rue Cases-Nègres” (1950), which was made into a film by Euzhan Palcy (* 1955)became internationally known, still optimistically describes the possibilities of social integration through education; the following novels as well as the poetry and the drama, however, are characterized by a rather pessimistic attitude, which under the influence of the writings of F. Fanon in addition to the fight against the ongoing (neo) colonial dependency v. a. the fundamental self-alienation of the Antillans assimilated to metropolitan culture is the theme – for example in Michèle Lacrosil (* 1911, † 2012), Serge Patient (* 1934) and Myriam Warner-Vieyra (* 1939). At S. Schwarz-BartIn her best-known novel “Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle” (1972; German “Télumée”) the identity conflict is resolved by referring back to the traditions of the rural community. É. In his novels, Glissant tried to counteract the loss of identity by reactivating the collective memory through a historical search for traces. É. But it was also Glissant who, in his influential volume of essays “Le discours antillais” (1981; German selection under the title “Zersplitterte Welten”), opposed the concept of neglect, which is essentially oriented towards Africa, with an own “Antillanian” cultural concept; but even he did not go unchallenged. Younger authors like Daniel Maximin (* 1947) - in his outstanding novel “L’isole soleil” (1981) – question the possibility of reconstructing history or favor – like P. Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant (* 1951) or Gisèle Pineau (* 1956) - a “Creole” committed to popular culture “A cultural concept or even completely renounce the concept of a“ national ”identity by, like M. Condé, taking into account the migration of the Antillans and allowing their protagonists to act in a transnational space.
