The ghost island that Columbus discovered and was buried by a volcano

After convincing the Catholic Monarchs and obtaining the corresponding financing, the objective of the boats was to find a new commercial route that crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Asia. The cause must be sought, in the first place, in the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453, who cut the land from Europe to the East, and in the second, that the route per sea opened by the Portuguese involved Circumnavegar the entire African continent, which was a journey too long and dangerous.

The arrival to a new continent was something that Columbus never imagined, but finding him literally saved his life already all his crew, because he thought that the distance he would have to travel to Asia was minor. He calculated that the distance to Cipango (Japan) was about 700 leagues, so that when he exceeded 800 without stalking land, his men lost hope and began to dream of returning home. However, in the early hours of October 12, 1492, El Vigía de la Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana, suddenly suddenly signed the island of Guanahaní, in the Bahamas. It was there that they had contact with the American indigenous people, the Taíos.

Columbus believed that they had reached an unknown island east of India. That is why he called the inhabitants of America “Indians. He baptized her as San Salvador and, after supplying water and food, followed her journey through the archipelago of the Bahamas, in the Caribbean. He arrived in Cuba, Haiti and Santo Domingo, who was the end of that first trip in January 1493. His ambition, however, did not diminish, because he already had the second trip on his head, which interests us for this story.

The second trip

The objective this time was to turn Christianity as indigenous, with the difference that this second adventure, which departed from Cádiz on September 25, 1493, had fifteen caravels also financed by the Catholic Monarchs. “It is debatable whether this end was achieved or not, but there is no doubt that it was an absolute success in terms of toponymic assignment,” says Diego González in ‘GEOGRAPHY HISTORIONS’ (Geoplaneta, 2025). Indeed, during the months that happened in the Caribbean, Columbus baptized the islands of Dominica, Santa María de Guadalupe (Guadalupe), Santa María la Antigua (Antigua), Puerto Rico and the archipelago of the eleven thousand virgins, the latter in honor of Santa Úrsula and its virgins.

Another of them was Montserrat, who was inhabited by Natives of the Arawak people. Actually, he named him of Santa María de Montserrate in tribute to the famous Catalan Virgin and the mountain of the same name of Barcelona, ​​which at that time was a pilgrimage destination. This rises 1,200 meters above sea level and ended up becoming a famous Benedictine monastery. It was there, in fact, where San Ignacio de Loyola swore to dedicate himself to contemplative life. In addition, the place has been wrapped for centuries in a halo of mystery in which stories of the Holy Alliance and the Holy Grail are mixed.

According to González in his work, where dozens of more stories about curious enclaves of the planet, Montserrat’s profile has a couple of mountains that dominate its small territory. One of them is a volcano called Soufrière Hills with more than a thousand meters of altitude. Its presence is quite imposing if we take into account that the island has barely one hundred square kilometers. Despite this, his crater was not threat to the inhabitants for centuries, since he barely had seismic activity. It was a kind of sleeping giant since the times when Columbus stepped on it for the first time at the end of the fifteenth century.

The sleeping giant

From that milestone, the truth is that the Spaniards enjoyed the island little. In 1632 it was occupied by the English, who changed their genesis completely. First, African slaves began to import, as usual in the other Caribbean enclaves at that time, and created sugar and cotton plantations. In 1782, during the United States Independence War, he was briefly invaded by France, but with the Treaty of Versailles a year later he returned to Great Britain.

Slavery was abolished in Montserrat in 1834 and plantations began to be worked by wage labor. Several members of the Sturge family bought the land and, in 1869, created the Montserrat Company Limited. To diversify their business, they plant limits. They later created a school for workers, but ended up selling the land to small farmers. The island then began to be forgotten, until, in 1960, the Beatles producer, George Martin, opened the Air studios there and attracted numerous world -fame musicians. There was no more inspiring place to record their albums than that quiet and lush tropical environment.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, there were two tragic events on the island. On September 17, 1989, Hurricane Hugo, with winds of 140 kilometers per hour, caused damage to 90% of Montserrat buildings. One of the most affected was the Air studio, which closed its doors forever. The truth is that the island recovered considerably in the following four years, but six years later suffered the greatest natural disaster in its history.

The eruption

On August 18, 1995, a disturbing sound took the four thousand inhabitants of Plymouth from the bed, the capital of Montserrat that had been founded by the British centuries ago. A black cloud emerged from the top of the volcano and ash covered cars and roofs. “After three days, the situation had worsened so much that the majority of the population had to be evacuated north of the island and could not return up to two weeks later,” Gonzalez recalls.

ABC, on the other hand, reported: «Montserrat, a small Caribbean island under colonial dominance of Great Britain, has been forced to become anyone’s land for the virulence of its volcano. The capital of the island, located two thousand kilometers from Miami, was yesterday a ghost city. The inhabitants of Plymouth have abandoned their picturesque city before the threat of black ash smokes. Scientists who follow their evolution have confirmed to local authorities the clear possibility of a huge explosion. The island of Montserrat, despite its paradisiacal landscape sighted by Columbus in 1493, is no stranger to natural punishments ».

The debacle

In case it was not enough, in December of that year the disaster and evacuation were repeated, this time, it lasted a month. In April 1996, there was a much more violent eruption, with pyroclastic flows sliding down slope in the direction of the capital. The four thousand neighbors were forced again to leave their homes, but never returned. Throughout the following weeks, the intensity increased and, in June, the longest and most powerful explosion was recorded, generating a pyroclastic cloud that covered everything Plymouth and its airport with two meters of lava and ash. This time 19 people died.

According to the author of ‘GEOGRAPHY HISTORIONS’, two thirds of the city ceased to be habitable and all businesses, the port and government buildings were buried in incandescent material. Seven thousand people of the 10,000 living on the island lost their home. The British government, administrator of Montserrat, quickly went to the rescue with a destroyer to rescue refugees and, during the following two years, became a ghost island. At the end of 1997, just a thousand people resisted there after the decree that had transformed 70% of the territory into a mandatory exclusion zone.

“The few inhabitants who remain on the island inevitable that, after two years of incessant volcanic activity, its current capital, which has been abandoned and is not habitable, is fully rebuilt,” said this newspaper. Actually, in addition to Plymouth, other 26 villages of Montserrat were abandoned. Since then, four have once again had inhabitants, but much less than before the volcano swept everything. Today, a new capital and a new port are being built to the north, where lava cannot be destroyed.