Exuma Cays

Where it sits. Exuma is a district of the Bahamas made up of more than 365 islands and cays strung over 130 miles of shallow bank between Nassau and Long Island. The two inhabited anchors are Great Exuma, 60 kilometres long, and Little Exuma, joined to it by a small bridge; north of them the Exuma Cays scatter towards the Land and Sea Park in a chain of sandbars, cuts and uninhabited islets. George Town, the district capital, sits on Elizabeth Harbour on Great Exuma and holds a population of well under two thousand; the district as a whole counted 6,928 people at the 2010 census, more than double its figure a decade earlier. The Tropic of Cancer crosses Pelican Beach on Little Exuma, which is why that stretch of sand carries the line's name.

The story behind it. The Lucayans called the cays Curateo, understood as the outer, far distant land; they were enslaved and removed by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, leaving the islands empty for two hundred years. In the interval the cuts and hidden harbours served pirates and wreckers — Elizabeth Harbour is traditionally named as a lair of Captain Kidd. Permanent resettlement came around 1783, when American loyalists fleeing the Revolutionary War arrived with enslaved workers and set up cotton plantations; George Town was named for George III. The soil was thin and the cotton failed within a generation. The single most consequential figure in local memory is John Rolle, 1st Baron Rolle, who on his death in 1842 left his Exuma landholdings to the people he had enslaved — the origin of the commonage system and of the settlements named Rolleville and Rolletown that still carry the name.

On screen. The Bahamian legs of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels used these waters. For Dead Man's Chest (2006), after finishing on Saint Vincent and in Dominica, the production moved to a small uninhabited island in the Bahamas called White Cay to shoot the beginning and the end of the Isla Cruces sequence — the stretch of beach where Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and James Norrington fight their three-way duel over the chest. Sandy Cay, a short boat ride from Little Exuma, is the cay named in most location listings for the film's beach work, and both sit within easy reach of the same shoreline. Exuma's other screen credit is older and better known locally: Thunderball Grotto, a few hundred yards off Staniel Cay, is the cave used in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball, and it can still be snorkelled at slack tide, when light shafts fall through holes in its roof.

What you actually see today. The colour of the water is not an exaggeration — a shallow bank of white oolitic sand under a metre or two of water produces a turquoise that reads as artificial in photographs. Sandbars surface at low tide in Pipe Creek and off the northern cays and disappear entirely six hours later. Big Major Cay, better known as Pig Beach, has a resident population of swimming pigs that is now the district's single most photographed attraction. Rocky iguanas bask on Allen's Cay and Bitter Guana Cay. Bonefish — the "grey ghost" — haunt the flats in water sometimes barely deep enough to cover their backs, and Exuma is one of the world's serious fly-fishing destinations for them. The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, run by the Bahamas National Trust, protects a long northern section as a no-take reserve.

Around George Town. The town is a working settlement rather than a resort strip: a straw market, a couple of banks, Regatta Point and the annual National Family Island Regatta in April, which fills the harbour with Bahamian sloops. Stocking Island lies ten minutes across the water by ferry, with a beach bar, a hilltop lookout and quiet Atlantic-facing sand. Exuma also carries a more recent and less flattering association: the Fyre Festival, staged and abandoned here in 2017.

Getting there and timing. Exuma International Airport, north of George Town, takes direct flights from Nassau and from several North American cities, and mail boats run from Nassau. A hire car is the practical way to see Great and Little Exuma; boat charters cover the cays, and full-day tours combining the pigs, the iguanas, a sandbar and Thunderball Grotto are the standard offering. December to April is the dry, breezy high season; late spring is warm and calmer; June to November carries hurricane risk. Sun cover matters more here than on almost any other Bahamian island, because the light comes off the sand and the water from every direction at once.