Basseterre, Saint Kitts and Nevis · UTC-4 ☆

Basseterre is in the America/St_Kitts timezone (AST/UTC-4). Saint Kitts and Nevis observes no daylight saving, keeping this small Caribbean nation on a fixed clock year-round.

Basseterre is the capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis, one of the smallest sovereign nations in the Western Hemisphere. The country has around 47,000 people,[3] and Basseterre, on the southwestern coast of Saint Kitts, holds perhaps half of them.

The clock is Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-4. The IANA identifier is America/St_Kitts. No daylight saving.

The Caribbean’s small island nations almost universally use UTC-4 without daylight saving. The latitude of Saint Kitts, at 17 degrees north, makes DST largely irrelevant: day length varies from roughly 11.5 to 12.5 hours throughout the year. There is no compelling case for adjusting the clock.

A colonial clock in the town center

Basseterre’s Circus, modeled on London’s Piccadilly Circus (though considerably smaller), is the colonial-era center of town. The Berkeley Memorial, a drinking fountain clock built in 1883 for a local merchant, still stands there. Clocks and colonial governance went together.

Saint Kitts has a sugar cane history going back centuries. The old sugar plantations, now largely converted to other uses or left as ruins, dot the island’s landscape. The Brimstone Hill Fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage site, still overlooks the western coast.

Baie-Mahault in Guadeloupe shares the same UTC-4 timezone, as does most of the eastern Caribbean.

9am in Basseterre is 1pm in London during European winter.

Read more about time in Saint Kitts and Nevis →