Our Environment

The three islands, Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, are located in the western Caribbean about 150 miles south of Cuba, 460 miles south of Miami, Florida and 167 miles northwest of Jamaica. George Town, the capital, is on the western shore of Grand Cayman.

Grand Cayman is the largest of the three islands with an area of about 76 square miles. It is approximately 22 miles long by four miles wide. The island’s most striking feature, the North Sound, is a shallow, 35-square mile, reef-protected lagoon, teeming with marine life and beautiful coral. The island is low-lying, with the highest point about 60 feet above sea level. 

Cayman Brac lies about 89 miles northeast of Grand Cayman. It is about 12 miles long x 1.25 miles wide and has an area of about 15 square miles. Its terrain is the most spectacular of the three islands. The Bluff, a massive central limestone outcrop, rises steadily along the length of the island up to 140 ft. above the sea at the eastern end.

Hidden behind limestone deposits on the Bluff’s cliff edges is the nation’s largest deposit of Caymanite, a semiprecious stone found only in the Cayman Islands. When extracted the rock reveals earth-toned colours and is often crafted and polished into jewellery and sculpture.

With an area of about 11 square miles, Little Cayman is the smallest of the three islands. It lies five miles west of Cayman Brac and is approximately ten miles long with an average width of just over a mile. The island is low-lying with a few areas on the north shore rising to 40 ft. above sea level. Having experienced the breathtaking Bloody Bay Wall, Jacques Cousteau famously hailed Little Cayman’s waters as one of the top three diving sites in the world.

There are no rivers on any of the islands. The coasts are largely protected by offshore reefs and in some places by a mangrove fringe that sometimes extends into inland swamps. 

Geographically, the Cayman Islands are part of the Cayman Ridge, an undersea mountain range which extends westward from Cuba all the way to the Gulf of Honduras. The Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over four miles, separates the three small islands from Jamaica. 

The islands are also located on the plate boundary between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates. The tectonic plates in Cayman’s region are in continuous lateral movement against each other. This movement, with the Caribbean plate travelling in an eastward direction and the North American plate moving west, limits the size of earthquakes. It is not unusual for minor tremors to be recorded. Many residents don’t even notice them.  A 7.7 earthquake rocked the Cayman Islands in January 2020. The event was strongly felt but cross-departmental efforts found limited damage.