Grace Bay and the World's Best Beach — Providenciales is where Grace Bay's turquoise perfection repeatedly earns the title of the world's #1 beach, the conch fritters are mandatory, and luxury arrives without pretension
Providenciales (universally called 'Provo') is the main island of the Turks and Caicos Islands (British Overseas Territory) in the northern Caribbean — an island of 35,000 people whose Grace Bay Beach has been voted the world's best beach by TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice 8 times since 2000 and consistently rates in the top 3 globally. The water here is a specific shade of turquoise produced by the shallow Caicos Bank (an enormous shallow-water carbonate platform just 1–3 metres deep for miles offshore) that is literally unmatched in the Caribbean. The Turks and Caicos is the world capital of…
The Turks and Caicos Islands were inhabited by Lucayan Taino people for centuries before Spanish slave raiders depopulated them in the early 16th century. The Turks Islands salt trade (from the Turks Island Passage, a shallow seabed of natural salt pans) was the economic foundation of British settlement from the late 17th century — Bermudian rakers harvested salt here annually from 1678. The Caicos Islands were settled separately for cotton plantations. The territory's administrative history is complex: governed at various times from the Bahamas, Jamaica, and directly from Britain. The modern…