In September 2023, the Redonda Ecosystem Reserve was established, covering nearly 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of land and sea,[1] making it the largest marine protected area in the region.

An account told by the fantasy writer M. P. Shiel in 1929 claimed that Redonda was established as an "independent kingdom" decades earlier in the 19th century.

[3] M. P. Shiel (1865–1947), an author of works of adventure and fantasy fiction, was the first person to give an account of the "Kingdom of Redonda," in 1929, in a promotional pamphlet for a reissue of his books.

[5] The son (originally named Matthew Phipps Shiell but later known as the writer M. P. Shiel) claimed he was crowned on Redonda at the age of 15, in 1880, by a bishop from Antigua.

In later life, Shiel gave the title, and the rights to his work, to his chief admirer, London poet and editor John Gawsworth (Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong), the biographer of Arthur Machen, who was the realm's Archduke.

[3] Gawsworth's realm has been facetiously termed "Almadonda" (by the Shielian scholar A. Reynolds Morse (1914–2000)) after the Alma pub in Westbourne Grove, Bayswater, London, where "King Juan" frequently held court in the 1960s.

[citation needed] Jon Wynne-Tyson subsequently visited Redonda in 1979, on an expedition organized by the philanthropist and Shielian publisher A. Reynolds Morse.

Wynne-Tyson ruled as King Juan II until abdicating in favour of the novelist Javier Marías of Madrid in 1997, transferring the literary executorship of Gawsworth and Shiel along with the title.

[citation needed] As in Gawsworth's reign, meetings of these rival groups have been held at the Fitzroy Tavern in Fitzrovia, central London.

[11] On the question of the Kingdom of Redonda, Wynne-Tyson has written: The legend is and should remain a pleasing and eccentric fairy tale; a piece of literary mythology to be taken with salt, romantic sighs, appropriate perplexity, some amusement, but without great seriousness.

They include Arthur Machen, Oliver Stonor, Edgar Jepson, Thomas Burke, Victor Gollancz, Carl Van Vechten, Arthur Ransome, Lawrence Durrell, Gerald Durrell, G. S. Fraser, Michael Harrison, John Heath-Stubbs, Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller, Julian MacLaren-Ross, Philip Lindsay, Rebecca West, John Waller, August Derleth, Stephen Graham, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.

Wynne-Tyson, Javier Marías, Bob Williamson, William Gates and Cedric Boston were all interviewed in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Redonda: The Island with Too Many Kings, broadcast in May 2007.

This ultimately failed when the Foreign and Commonwealth Office pointed out that His Majesty's Government recognises Redonda as a dependent territory of Antigua and Barbuda which, accordingly, is not entitled to establish a separate embassy or high commission in the United Kingdom.