There is a major debate about the first European visitor. While the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas has probably the strongest claim to be where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas in 1492, there are many exponents of the theory that it was in fact Grand Turk that saw his ships pull up to shore.

With Spanish slaving ships raiding the island for Amerindian labour for the goldmines of South America, by 1513 the population had been reduced to zero. As for the colonial powers, ownership of the Islands passed between Spain, France and Britain, but none was interested in setting up base. Between 1690 and 1720 Providenciales and the Caicos Cays were used as hiding places by pirates , and stories of buried gold and jewels still bring treasure hunters to the Islands.

By the late seventeenth century, though, it was a new "treasure" that drew occasional visitors: salt-rakers from Bermuda, who had discovered the ease with which salt could be produced from shallow salt-water ponds or salinas which were constructed across the islands. This was particularly true in Salt Cay, Grand Turk and South Caicos, where large numbers of trees were chopped down to discourage rainfall (resulting in the largely bare landscape that endures today). "White gold", as the stuff came to be known, was a highly lucrative crop, much of it sent off to Newfoundland for salting cod, and some of the remaining grand houses on Salt Cay are testament to that profitable era. By 1781 the rakers had established a permanent settlement in Grand Turk.

Meanwhile, the Caicos Islands became inhabited only after the American War of Independence, when thousands of defeated Loyalists fled from the southern states such as Georgia and the Carolinas. Some were granted large tracts of land by the British government, from Providenciales to Middle Caicos, in recompense for what they had lost in North America. Around forty Loyalists arrived during the 1780s, bringing with them more than one thousand slaves, and began farming cotton.

Though immediately successful - Caicos cotton was said to be among the finest in the world - the cotton industry went into decline after just a generation, with hurricanes and pests taking a heavy toll. Though a few planters moved to the Turks Islands and went into salt, almost all of the planters had left the country by the mid-1820s, leaving their slaves behind to a subsistence existence of farming and fishing, much like the original population of Amerindians.

For the next century, the economy was sustained by the remnants of the salt industry, but there was little population growth and the pace of life was extremely slow. Things began to change with the arrival of a group of American investors in the 1960s, who laid the foundations for tourist development , building a small airstrip on Provo and erecting the first hotel - Third Turtle - in Turtle Cove. A trickle of foreign visitors began to arrive, turning into a steady stream once Club Med insisted on a proper airport to service their Grace Bay resort in the mid-1980s, and then a small flood with the arrival of further resorts through the 1990s.