Paradise Island

Where it sits. Paradise Island is a narrow limestone strip of about 685 acres lying immediately north of Nassau, separated from New Providence by a channel a few hundred metres wide that forms Nassau's harbour. It runs roughly six and a half kilometres east to west and is rarely more than 800 metres across. The north shore faces the open Atlantic and carries the sand — Cabbage Beach and Paradise Beach, both long, pale and steeply shelving — while the south shore looks back across the water at the pastel government buildings and cruise berths of the Bahamian capital. Two bridges, opened in 1967 and 1998, connect it to Nassau; the eastbound span carries a toll.

From Hog Island to Paradise. The island was called Hog Island for most of its recorded history and used for farming and little else. In the 1930s the Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren bought a large part of it and laid out terraced formal gardens in the French manner behind his estate. His wartime blacklisting by the Allies over alleged Axis sympathies ended that chapter, and in 1959 the property passed to Huntington Hartford, heir to the A&P grocery fortune, who renamed it Paradise Island in 1962 and set about turning it into a resort. Hartford built the Ocean Club and completed the strangest object on the island: the French Cloister, the stones of a fourteenth-century Augustinian cloister from near Montréjeau in southwestern France, bought and shipped to the United States in crates by William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s and never reassembled. Hartford acquired the crates, had them brought to the Bahamas, and had the arcade rebuilt at the head of the Versailles Gardens, where it now frames a view down terraces of statuary to the harbour.

On screen. The Bahamas have been Bond territory since Thunderball (1965), and Paradise Island holds two of the series' set pieces. In Thunderball, Sean Connery's Bond first sits down opposite Emilio Largo across a chemin-de-fer table at the Café Martinique on the island, the scene that establishes the villain and the film's tone before any of the underwater work begins; the production shot through the spring of 1965 in and around Nassau, staging a Junkanoo parade for the finale and sinking a Vulcan bomber mock-up in shallow water off New Providence for the celebrated diving sequences. Never Say Never Again (1983) returned to Nassau with Connery for the unofficial remake. Forty years after Thunderball, Casino Royale (2006) used the Ocean Club on Paradise Island as itself: Daniel Craig's Bond checks in, plays poker with Alex Dimitrios and wins the Aston Martin DB5 from him in the resort's car park before following Dimitrios's wife Solange along the beach. The film's opening free-running chase, nominally in Madagascar, was shot on New Providence at a construction site at Coral Harbour, not on Paradise Island — a distinction location guides frequently get wrong.

What is there now. The island's centre of gravity is Atlantis, the resort that opened in 1994 under Sol Kerzner's Sun International and expanded with the coral-pink Royal Towers in 1998. Its scale is the point: a 141-acre waterscape of slides, a lazy river and lagoons, and a set of aquariums holding sharks, rays and one of the larger public collections of Caribbean marine life, threaded beneath and around the hotels. The Ocean Club survives at the quieter eastern end, now a Four Seasons property, with the Versailles Gardens and the cloister open to guests. Between them lie a golf course, a marina at Hurricane Hole and a strip of restaurants at Marina Village. Cabbage Beach is a public beach with public access points, though the loungers in front of the resorts are not.

Practicalities. Nassau's Lynden Pindling International Airport is about 25 minutes away by road on the far side of New Providence. From downtown Nassau, water taxis cross from Prince George Wharf to the island in around ten minutes, which is faster and cheaper than a taxi over the bridge. Prices on the island are high by Caribbean standards, and a resort day pass is the usual mechanism for non-guests wanting the waterpark. The Atlantis complex is level and fully accessible; the beaches less so.

Timing. December to April brings dry, breezy weather in the mid-twenties and the highest prices; June to November is the hurricane season, hotter and more humid, with the peak risk in September and October. Cruise ships dock in Nassau most mornings and the beaches and water taxis are busiest between ten and four, so early mornings on Cabbage Beach are notably calmer.