A country · 29 places · 4 regions
Bahamas, all of it.
29 curated places across 4 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
Bahamas reads below in 4 chapters — New Providence, Exuma, Berry Islands and East Grand Bahama — in any order you like.
Chapter I · New Providence · 11 places
New Providence
Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas, situated on the island of New Providence, and retains a compact colonial core of pastel-painted government buildings, the 18th-century Fort Charlotte, and the pink-walled Parliament Square. The Graycliff Hotel complex preserves one of the oldest private residences in the Bahamas, dating to the 1740s. Across the bridge on Paradise Island, a series of marine exhibits within large lagoon facilities display manta rays and sharks in one of the largest open-air marine habitat complexes in the Atlantic region.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Exuma · 3 places
Exuma
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.
✦ December to April · $$$
Chapter III · Berry Islands · 1 place
Berry Islands
One of the oldest wooden residences in the Bahamian capital, an eighteenth-century two-storey house named for the overhanging balcony that shades its street front. Built of American soft cedar with mortise-and-tenon joinery, it survives as a rare example of early colonial domestic architecture in Nassau. Restored and furnished with period antiques, it operates as a house museum interpreting the daily life of the town's earlier inhabitants. An interior staircase salvaged from a ship is among its distinctive features.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · East Grand Bahama · 1 place
East Grand Bahama
Lucayan National Park lies on the south coast of Grand Bahama, about 40 kilometres east of Freeport along the Grand Bahama Highway, in the East Grand Bahama district. It was established in 1982 and is small on land — around 40 acres of dry ground — but covers close to 2,000 acres in total once its creeks, mangroves and marine section are counted. The park's celebrated feature is underground: one of the longest surveyed underwater cave systems in the world, with more than ten kilometres of charted tunnel running beneath the pine forest and out towards the sea. What is here. The park packs an unusual number of Bahamian habitats into a short walk. On the north side of the highway, two entrances give access to the cave system: Ben's Cave, reached by a stair into a collapsed sinkhole where the freshwater lens floats above salt water in a visible haloline, and the Burial Mound Cave, where Lucayan remains were recovered — the clearest surviving trace of the Indigenous people for whom the park is named. The caves are a scientific site of the first order: the crustacean class Remipedia was discovered here in 1979, in water no diver had entered before. On the south side, a boardwalk crosses a mangrove creek and a low dune ridge to reach Gold Rock Beach. Between the two lie stands of Caribbean pine, palmetto and a bird list that has earned the park Important Bird Area status, with thick-billed vireo, Bahama swallow and olive-capped warbler among the species regularly recorded. Gold Rock Beach. At high water this is an ordinary, pretty beach; at low tide it becomes something else entirely, as the sea withdraws several hundred metres and leaves a vast plain of hard rippled sand, shallow warm pools and a solitary limestone outcrop — the gold rock itself — standing offshore. It is one of the most photographed shorelines in the Bahamas for exactly that reason, and the tide table is the single most useful thing to check before driving out. On screen. The stretch of coast immediately east of the park is where the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels did their heavy marine work. The former United States Air Force missile-tracking station near High Rock, used for decades in connection with launches from Cape Canaveral, was converted into Gold Rock Creek Enterprises — later the Bahamas Film Studios — with one of the largest open-water filming enclosures in the world. Gore Verbinski's crew moved to Grand Bahama on 18 September 2005 to shoot ship exteriors for Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, including the working Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman. It was a difficult period: the tank had not actually been finished when the unit arrived, and Hurricane Wilma damaged access roads and pumps in October, though no ship was lost. Gold Rock Beach itself appears in the finished films as open Caribbean shoreline. Recent history. Grand Bahama's east end took the full force of Hurricane Dorian in September 2019, when the storm stalled over the island for the better part of two days and drove seawater far inland. The park's boardwalks, signage and pine forest were badly damaged, and salt intrusion killed large areas of standing pine that remain visible as grey skeletons. Rebuilding has been incremental, and access arrangements have changed more than once since, so checking current opening details before driving out is sensible. What a visit involves. The park is compact enough for two to three hours: half an hour underground and at the sinkholes, twenty minutes on the boardwalk through mangrove and dune, and as long as the tide allows on the beach. Entry is by a modest fee collected at the gate. Cave diving is permitted only by permit to certified cave divers and is not a casual activity — the systems are long, dark and unforgiving. Above ground the walking is flat, with steps into the caves and a raised boardwalk that is passable for most visitors but not fully step-free. Getting there and timing. There is no scheduled bus; visitors drive a hire car from Freeport in about 40 minutes on the Grand Bahama Highway, or join a half-day tour, often combined with a stop at Banana Bay or a fish fry at Smith's Point. Grand Bahama International Airport at Freeport is the arrival point, with short hops from Nassau and Florida. November to April brings the driest and coolest weather; summer is hot, humid and prone to afternoon storms, and the hurricane season runs June to November. Take water, insect repellent for the mangrove section, and a torch for the caves — the lighting inside is minimal by design.
✦ December to April · $
Regions of Bahamas
Every place in Bahamas
