In November 1493, during his second voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus sailed through the Leeward Islands and sighted the islands now known as St Kitts and Nevis. It was the first recorded European encounter with the islands — the moment they entered European maps and records, with consequences that would transform them forever. But it was not the beginning of their story: the islands had already been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.
The islands before 1493
By the time Columbus’s fleet passed, the Kalinago people were the masters of the islands, heirs to a succession of Indigenous cultures stretching back as far as 3000 BCE. They called St Kitts Liamuiga — “fertile island” — and Nevis Oualie, “land of beautiful waters”. These names survive today: Mount Liamuiga crowns St Kitts, and Oualie Beach welcomes visitors to Nevis. The Kalinago lived by fishing, agriculture and inter-island trade, travelling the Eastern Caribbean in large seagoing canoes.
The second voyage
Columbus’s second expedition was a far larger undertaking than his first: a fleet of 17 ships and over a thousand men, dispatched by the Spanish Crown to establish settlements in the Caribbean. Sweeping north-west through the Lesser Antilles in November 1493, the fleet passed and named many of the islands of the Eastern Caribbean. Columbus did not land on St Kitts or Nevis; the islands were sighted, named and sailed past.
How the islands got their European names
Tradition holds that the larger island was named San Cristóbal — Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers and the explorer’s own namesake — and English settlers later shortened “Saint Christopher” to the affectionate “St Kitts”. Nevis took its name from the Spanish Nuestra Señora de las Nieves — “Our Lady of the Snows” — inspired by the white clouds that habitually wreath the summit of Nevis Peak like a snowcap. Historians note that the exact names Columbus assigned to individual islands on this voyage are debated; what is certain is that by the early colonial era the names Saint Christopher and Nevis were fixed on European charts.
What the encounter set in motion
Spain charted the islands but never settled them, leaving them to the Kalinago for another 130 years. When European settlement finally came — with the English colony of 1623 and the French soon after — it brought catastrophe for the Kalinago, through violence and displacement, and began the colonial era of sugar and slavery that shaped the islands for centuries.
Legacy
The sighting of 1493 marks the start of the islands’ documented place in European history — a date that belongs in any telling of the national story, alongside the far older Indigenous heritage it interrupted. Both legacies live on in the federation today: in its place names, its monuments and its people’s memory.