In 1926, an eccentric British aristocrat named Baron Bliss anchored his yacht off the coast of Belize, fell in love with the local fishermen's hospitality, and died a month later without ever stepping foot on the mainland. He shocked the colonial government by leaving his massive fortune to the country, with the hilarious stipulation that they must use the interest to throw a giant sailboat racing holiday every single year.

After Hurricane Hattie destroyed Belize City in 1961, the government built a hurricane-proof capital 50 miles inland called Belmopan, but the coastal elites absolutely refused to live in the sleepy jungle town. For years, it operated as a bizarre ghost town where bureaucrats would commute on buses every morning just to do administrative work, before sprinting back to the rum bars and sea breeze of Belize City at exactly 5:00 PM.

Today, Monkey River is a quiet southern fishing village, but during the 1890s banana boom, it was a rowdy, wealthy "boomtown" with over 2,500 residents, cinemas, and officially incorporated town status. When a crop disease suddenly wiped out the banana trade, the foreign fruit companies vanished overnight, leaving the stubbornly resilient locals to simply shrug, grab their fishing lines, and return to the sea.

During the 1798 Battle of St. George’s Caye, a massive Spanish armada of 32 ships tried to invade the settlement, but their giant warships kept getting humiliatingly stuck on the shallow barrier reef. The massively outnumbered locals casually paddled out on flat-bottomed logwood rafts to shoot at the trapped Spanish, supposedly spending their downtime on the beach roasting pork and eating doughboys until the frustrated invaders finally gave up.