Margarita is an island off the coast of Venezuela in the southern Caribbean that happens to be well known to people in Europe and Canada, but is almost completely unknown to the people of the United States.

It's the last of the cheap Caribbean hideaways. After researching locations offshore to live or retire, we were so impressed with what we'd learned about Margarita that we moved here. Quite literally, there isn't anything in the Caribbean to compare with the cost of living or the real estate prices.

Our goal is to provide you with all the information you'd need to move here and avoid the problems that are waiting to "trap" you. Like any major move, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and we've been through the process.

Once you're here, there's a definite learning curve, and that's part of what we write about. Like the rest of Latin America, relationships are everything: it isn't what you know so much as it it who you know.

Each article is periodically reviewed to make sure that it's up to date, and we add new articles to this section weekly.