Belize

Belize is Central America's smallest and least populous mainland nation, the only one where English is the official language, a legacy of British colonial rule. Wedged between Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean Sea, it guards the longest barrier reef in the Western Hemisphere and a mosaic of rainforest, lagoons, and Maya ruins. With barely half a million people drawn from Creole, Maya, Mestizo, and Garifuna communities, Belize feels at once Caribbean and Central American, a quiet outlier with outsized natural riches.

The coastal lowlands are flat, swampy, and fringed by hundreds of cayes and atolls along the Belize Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage site famed for the Great Blue Hole. Inland, the land rises into the Maya Mountains, where Doyle's Delight reaches 1,124 meters, blanketed in broadleaf jungle, pine ridge, and cave systems. A hot, humid tropical climate brings a marked wet season and a recurring hurricane threat.

Once the heart of Maya civilization, with sites like Caracol and Xunantunich, the territory became British Honduras before independence in 1981. Tourism centered on diving, reefs, and ruins now anchors the economy alongside agriculture and offshore services. A long-running territorial dispute with Guatemala, conservation of its reef and forests, and small-state vulnerability to storms and climate define its present.

• North America
  The third-largest continent, from the Arctic to the tropics located in
• Guatemala
  The Maya heartland of highland volcanoes and rainforest neighboring country
• Mexico
  Where ancient civilizations and a modern powerhouse meet neighboring country