Greater Antilles in the context of "Florida"

Puerto Rico (abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a self-governing Caribbean archipelago and island organized as an unincorporated territory of the United States under the designation of commonwealth. Located about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southeast of Miami, Florida, between the Dominican Republic in the Greater Antilles and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Lesser Antilles, it consists of the eponymous main island and numerous smaller islands, including Vieques, Culebra, and Mona. With approximately 3.2 million residents, it is divided into 78 municipalities, of which the most populous is the capital municipality of San Juan, followed by those within the San Juan metropolitan area. Spanish and English are the official languages of the government, though Spanish predominates.

Puerto Rico was settled by a succession of Amerindian peoples beginning 2,000 to 4,000 years ago; these included the Ortoiroid, Saladoid, and Taíno. It was claimed by Spain following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493 and subsequently colonized by Juan Ponce de León in 1508. Puerto Rico was contested by other European powers into the 18th century but remained a Spanish possession for the next 400 years. The decline of the Indigenous population, followed by an influx of Spanish settlers, primarily from the Canary Islands and Andalusia, and African slaves vastly changed the cultural and demographic landscape of the archipelago. Within the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico played a secondary but strategically significant role compared to larger and wealthier colonies like Peru and New Spain. By the late 19th century, a distinct Puerto Rican identity began to emerge, centered on a fusion of European, African, and Indigenous elements. In 1898, following the Spanish–American War, Puerto Rico was acquired by the United States.

The Caribbean is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north and also the west through Central America, and South America to the south, it comprises numerous islands, cays, islets, reefs, and banks.

It includes the Lucayan Archipelago, Greater Antilles, and Lesser Antilles of the West Indies; the Quintana Roo islands and Belizean islands of the Yucatán Peninsula; and the Bay Islands, Miskito Cays, Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina, Corn Islands, and San Blas Islands of Central America. It also includes the coastal areas on the continental mainland of the Americas bordering the region from the Yucatán Peninsula in North America through Central America to the Guianas in South America.

The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the North Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, located south of the Gulf of Mexico and southwest of the Sargasso Sea. It is bounded by the Greater Antilles to the north from Cuba to Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles to the east from the Virgin Islands to Trinidad and Tobago, South America to the south from the Venezuelan coastline to the Colombian coastline, and Central America and the Yucatán Peninsula to the west from Panama to Mexico. The geopolitical region around the Caribbean Sea, including the numerous islands of the West Indies and adjacent coastal areas in the mainland of the Americas, is known as the Caribbean.

The Caribbean Sea is one of the largest seas on Earth and has an area of about 2,754,000 km (1,063,000 sq mi). The sea's deepest point is the Cayman Trough, between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, at 7,686 m (25,217 ft) below sea level. The Caribbean coastline has many gulfs and bays: the Gulf of Gonâve, the Gulf of Venezuela, the Gulf of Darién, Golfo de los Mosquitos, the Gulf of Paria and the Gulf of Honduras.

The geography of Puerto Rico encompasses the geographical features of Puerto Rico, a Caribbean archipelagic and island nation centered around a collective identity based on its land, history, ethnicity, culture, and language, and organized as a self-governing unincorporated territory of the United States. Located between the Greater and Lesser Antilles in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, east of Hispaniola, west of Saint Thomas, north of Venezuela, and south of the Puerto Rico Trench, it consists of the eponymous main island of Puerto Rico and 142 smaller islands, islets, and cays, including San Juan Islet in the north, Vieques and Culebra islands in the Virgin Islands, and Palominos island and Icacos cay in La Cordillera nature reserve in the east, Caja de Muertos island in Caja de Muertos reserve, and Caracoles and Media Luna cays in La Parguera reserve in the south, and Mona, Monito, and Desecheo islands in the Mona Passage in the west.

Measuring 177 km (110 mi; 96 nmi) in length and 65 km (40 mi; 35 nmi) in width with a land area of 8,868 sq km (3,424 sq mi), the main island of Puerto Rico is the 4th largest in the Caribbean, 29th in the Americas, and 81st in the world, making it the 170th largest country or dependency by surface area. With 3.2 million residents, it is also the 4th largest in the Caribbean, 4th in the Americas, and 31st in the world, making it the 136th largest country or dependency by population.

The Dominican Republic is a country in the Caribbean located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean. It shares a maritime border with Puerto Rico to the east and a land border with Haiti to the west, occupying the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola which, along with Saint Martin, is one of only two islands in the Caribbean shared by two sovereign states. In the Antilles, the country is the second-largest nation by area after Cuba at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi) and second-largest by population after Haiti with approximately 11.4 million people in 2024, of whom 3.6 million reside in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city.

The native Taíno people had inhabited Hispaniola prior to European contact, dividing it into five chiefdoms. Christopher Columbus claimed the island for Castile, landing there on his first voyage in 1492. The colony of Santo Domingo became the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. In 1697, Spain recognized French dominion over the western third of the island, which became the independent First Empire of Haiti in 1804. A group of Dominicans deposed the Spanish governor and declared independence from Spain in November 1821, but were annexed by Haiti in February 1822. Independence came 22 years later in 1844, after victory in the Dominican War of Independence. The next 72 years saw several civil wars, failed invasions by Haiti, and a brief return to Spanish colonial status, before permanently ousting the Spanish during the Dominican Restoration War of 1863–1865. From 1930, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo ruled until his assassination in 1961. Juan Bosch was elected president in 1962 but was deposed in a military coup in 1963. The Dominican Civil War of 1965 preceded the authoritarian rule of Joaquín Balaguer (1966–1978 and 1986–1996). Since 1978, the Dominican Republic has moved towards representative democracy.

The Lesser Antilles is a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea, forming part of the West Indies in Caribbean region of the Americas. They are distinguished from the larger islands of the Greater Antilles to the west. They form an arc which begins east of Puerto Rico at the archipelago of the Virgin Islands, swings southeast through the Leeward and Windward Islands towards South America, and turns westward through the Leeward Antilles along the Venezuelan coast.

Most of them are part of a long, partially volcanic island arc between the Greater Antilles to the north-west and the continent of South America. The islands of the Lesser Antilles form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Together, the Lesser Antilles and the Greater Antilles make up the Antilles. The Lesser and Greater Antilles, together with the Lucayan Archipelago, are collectively known as the Caribbean islands or West Indies.

The West Indies are an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies in three archipelagos: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago.

The subregion includes all the islands in the Antilles, in addition to The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in the North Atlantic Ocean. The term is often interchangeable with "Caribbean", although the latter may also include coastal regions of Central and South American mainland nations, including Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as the Atlantic island nation of Bermuda, all of which are culturally related but geographically distinct from the three main island groups.

Hispaniola is an island in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean, located between Cuba and Puerto Rico. It is the most populous island in the West Indies, and the second-largest by land area, after Cuba. Covering an area of 76,192-square-kilometre (29,418 sq mi), it is divided into two separate sovereign countries: the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic (48,445 km (18,705 sq mi)) to the east and the French and Haitian Creole–speaking Haiti (27,750 km (10,710 sq mi)) to the west. The only other divided island in the Caribbean is Saint Martin, which is shared between France (Saint Martin) and the Netherlands (Sint Maarten). At the time of the European arrival of Christopher Columbus, Hispaniola was home to the Ciguayo, Macorix, and Ciboney and Classic Taíno native peoples.

Hispaniola is the site of the first European fort in the Americas, La Navidad (1492–1493), the first settlement, La Isabela (1493–1500), and the first permanent settlement, the capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo (1498–present). These settlements were founded successively during each of Christopher Columbus's first three voyages under the patronage of the Spanish Empire.