Queen Elizabeth II Botanic Park

The park begins at the visitor centre with a display about the blue iguana breeding programme, and the guide will tell you that this park holds the single most important population of one of the world's rarest reptiles: every blue iguana you see wandering the lake path is a hand-reared individual that was once part of the captive breeding operation and is now free-ranging within the park boundaries.

The lake trail is a flat circuit of about a kilometre that loops around a lily-covered lagoon where American white ibis, green herons and least grebes fish from the overhanging branches, and the sound of the island is everywhere: the whir of bananaquit calls, the hollow knocking of the national bird, the Grand Cayman woodpecker, and the distant splash of a morrison's anole dropped into the water by a hunting mangrove snake.

The floral highlight is the colour garden, a formal bed of bromeliads, heliconia and native orchids arranged by colour that is most vivid from March through June when the tropical bloom is at its peak and the Cayman butterfly darts between the ginger and the bird of paradise with a persistence that makes you realise the garden is as much a habitat as a display.

Blue iguana encounters are probabilistic rather than guaranteed: on a cool morning they may be basking on the rocks near the lake, on a hot afternoon they are more likely to be in the shaded iguana hollow near the southern gate, but the park's staff have learned that the animals are most active around feeding time in the late morning when the captive programme staff put out fruit and vegetables.

The heritage garden section recreates a traditional Caymanian kitchen garden with cassava, sweet potato and callaloo growing the way they would have been grown a century ago, and the interpretation board explains which plants were used for medicine, which for building and which for food during the island's isolation before the bridge and airport connected Grand Cayman to the outside world.

A boardwalk leads through a small mangrove swamp at the park's southern edge where you can see the same type of water that dominates the island's interior, and the clarity of the water reveals the root systems of the red mangrove and the small fish sheltering among the prop roots, giving a miniature version of what the Stingray City water looks like without the dramatic depth.

The park is deliberately low-key: there are no large visitor facilities, no gift shop of any size and no cafe, and the intention is that this is a nature reserve first and a visitor attraction second, which means the experience is of Caymanian wildness rather than curated entertainment.

The park is the primary stronghold of the Grand Cayman blue iguana (Cyclura lewisi), one of the rarest reptiles on earth, and offers one of the few places where visitors can see these animals in a semi-wild state with genuine conservation value rather than purely zoological display.

The combination of lake walks, bird hides, heritage gardens and mangrove boardwalk makes it the most varied natural attraction on Grand Cayman in a single visit.

The park is the only significant natural area on Grand Cayman that is specifically protected and managed for native biodiversity.