Antilles

The Antilles[1] is an archipelago bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the south and west, the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and the Atlantic Ocean to the north and east.

[2] Geographically, the Antillean islands are generally considered a subregion of North America.

The word Antilles originated in the period before the European colonization of the Americas, Antilia being one of those mysterious lands which figured on the medieval charts, sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as continuous land of greater or lesser extent, its location fluctuating in mid-ocean between the Canary Islands and India.

[4] After the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus's expedition in what was later called the West Indies, the European powers realized that the dispersed lands constituted an extensive archipelago in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

Early Spanish visitors called them the Windward Islands (today having a narrower definition).