Belize City

The City Everyone Rushes Through

Belize City gets a bad reputation and some of it is earned. The crime statistics that tour operators cite aren’t invented. The poverty in certain neighborhoods is real and visible. Every piece of printed travel advice tells you to get in and get out — book the transfer to Ambergris or the bus to San Ignacio and don’t linger.

I ignored this and spent a day and a half walking, and the city I found was specific and layered in a way that the islands are not. It is the former capital — hurricanes Hattie (1961) and Greta (1978) drove the administrative center to the purpose-built Belmopan — and it carries that residual status with some dignity and some neglect. The old wooden buildings along the seafront and the Southern Foreshore have faded to beautiful. The canals smell of the sea. The light in the early morning, before the traffic builds, is amber and specific.

The Swing Bridge

The Belize City Swing Bridge is the last manually operated swing bridge in the Americas still in regular use, or so I have read in enough places to take it as probably true. It crosses Haulover Creek twice a day — around 6 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. — pivoting on a central pylon to let taller vessels pass. A crew of men turns the bridge by hand using long metal poles.

I arrived at the morning opening without planning to. I was walking to the market and heard the chain of preparation sounds — a bell, shouting, an engine backing off — and turned a corner to find fifty people waiting on both sides of the creek while the bridge swung. It takes about fifteen minutes. Nobody seemed inconvenienced. People talked to each other or checked their phones or simply stood, in that easy patience that you see in places where time is not the dominant concern.

The bridge has been here since 1923. It connects the commercial center south of the creek to the Fort George neighborhood north of it. Crossing it on foot feels momentous in inverse proportion to the distance covered.

The Fort George Quarter

North of Haulover Creek, the Fort George neighborhood is where the old colonial infrastructure concentrated: the Supreme Court building, the Anglican cathedral (the oldest church in Central America, completed 1847), the Museum of Belize in the old colonial prison, the Baron Bliss Memorial on a small point overlooking the harbor.

Baron Bliss himself is worth a paragraph: an eccentric Portuguese-English yachtsman who arrived in Belize City in 1926 while ill, anchored in the harbor for two months without going ashore, was treated with great kindness by locals who brought him food and company, and died on the yacht before he could land — leaving most of his estate to the country. Belize City celebrates Baron Bliss Day every March 9. There is something about this story that seems to perfectly encapsulate how foreigners and Belize have always related to each other.

The Market and the Waterfront

The Municipal Market near the Swing Bridge is a proper covered market with produce, meat, fish, and cooked food. Women sell tamales wrapped in banana leaves from coolers. There are stalls with dried chiles, with avocados piled in pyramids, with the bright orange habaneros that appear in Belizean cooking with an enthusiasm borrowed from the Yucatán.

I ate at a lunch counter inside the market: rice and beans with stewed chicken, a glass of watermelon juice, change from a Belizean five dollar bill. The women running the stall spoke to each other in Kriol and to me in English and to the man next to me in Spanish without any particular shift in register. Belize City is a multilingual city in a way that most small capitals are not, and the market is where you hear all of it at once.

When to go: December through April is the dry season and the most comfortable time, with lower humidity and reliable sun. The city is a practical transit hub year-round — most travelers pass through Phillip Goldson International Airport and the ferry terminal regardless of season. Plan to arrive early if you’re taking the water taxi to the cayes; the morning boats run on schedule in a way that Belize does not always guarantee.