Utila
municipality in Bay Islands Department, Honduras
Utila (Spanish: Isla de Utila) is the smallest of Honduras' major Bay Islands, after Roatán and Guanaja, in a region that marks the south end of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the second-largest in the world. It has been documented in history since Columbus' fourth voyage.
Geography
The eastern end of the island is capped by a thin veneer of basaltic volcanic rocks, erupted from several pyroclastic cones including 74 m (243 ft) Pumpkin Hill which forms the highest point on the island.
Demographics
The people of Utila are of Afro-Indigenous (Garífuna), English and Dutch descent. At the time of the 2013 Honduras census, Utila municipality had a population of 3,947. Of these, 82.32% were Mestizo, 13.42% White, 2.10% Black or Afro-Honduran, 0.26% Indigenous and 1.91% others.
Environment
The island is part of the Islas de la Bahía y Cayos Cochinos Important Bird Area (IBA), designated as such by BirdLife International because it supports significant populations of white-crowned pigeons, chimney swifts and yellow-naped amazons. Since 2013 the entire island and its cays have been designated as a protected Ramsar site. Popular cays include Water Cay, Pigeon Cay and Sandy Cay.
Ecologically, the island's coastal mangrove forests serve as the exclusive critical habitat for the critically endangered Utila spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura bakeri), while surrounding shallow seagrass beds support essential nursery environments for regional marine fauna.
“Utila” enters the record as municipality in Bay Islands Department, Honduras. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Utila, municipality and Islands can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Utila” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Utila, municipality and Islands provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1572113. Authority coordinates are 16.097, -86.937. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Utila”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Utila primary sources, Utila archive and Utila research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Utila” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.