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Central America & Caribbean
Central America is fundamentally a volcanic land bridge — a chain of active and dormant volcanoes runs the length of the region on its Pacific side, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, giving countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica some of their most recognizable landscapes. The Caribbean side of the isthmus is generally lower, flatter, and covered in dense rainforest. Panama narrows to its famous isthmus point, where the canal exploits the shortest practical distance between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, while Belize is fronted by the second-longest barrier reef system in the world.
The Caribbean islands split into two broad geological groups. The larger islands closest to the mainland — Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico — sit on the Caribbean Plate's northern edge and have real interior mountain ranges, not the flat sandbar of popular imagination. Further southeast, the Lesser Antilles (Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and others) form a volcanic island arc in their own right, with several active volcanoes of their own — a younger, more compact version of the same tectonic forces shaping the mainland.