Bahamas

Nassau (population 280,000, on New Providence Island) has the British colonial architecture of Downtown (Parliament Square, Government House, the pink Supreme Court building) and Cable Beach for the first evening. The Nassau Straw Market and the Fish Fry at Arawak Cay (the most authentic Bahamian food experience in New Providence — conch fritters, cracked conch, fish platters).

💡 Nassau was the base of operations for New Providence pirates — most famously Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Anne Bonny, Mary Read and Charles Vane — from the 1690s to 1718. The Royal Governor Woodes Rogers eliminated the pirate republic in 1718 by hanging 10 pirates on the Nassau waterfront; the motto he established for the Bahamas was “Expulsis Piratis, Restituta Commercia” (Pirates Expelled, Commerce Restored).

The Queen’s Staircase (66 steps hand-carved from solid limestone by enslaved people in the 1790s, cutting through a cliff to Fort Fincastle), Fort Charlotte (the largest fort in the Bahamas, 1788, 42 cannons, never fired in anger), the Atlantis marine exhibits on Paradise Island and the Junkanoo Museum (Junkanoo — the Bahamian Boxing Day street festival of sequined costumes, goatskin drums and cowbells — is the defining cultural expression of the Bahamas).

💡 Junkanoo (celebrated at dawn on 26 December and 1 January) is the most visually spectacular festival in the Caribbean — competing groups of hundreds spend 11 months preparing costumes made entirely of crepe paper glued over cardboard armatures, built in secret “shacks.” The secrecy is real; rival groups have spied on each other’s preparations for decades.

35-min flight from Nassau to Exuma (GGT) or ferry. The Exuma Cays — 365 islands and cays in 120km of ocean, with the most extraordinary shallow-water colour gradients in the world (turquoise over white sand, impossible azure over sea grass, deep blue in the channels) and Pig Beach (Big Major Cay) — where a colony of wild swimming pigs has lived for decades, meeting tourist boats in the water.

💡 The Pig Beach pigs on Big Major Cay arrived by unknown means — the most popular theory is that they were deposited by sailors who intended to return and cook them but never did. They have swum out to meet tourist boats for at least 40 years and are now one of the most photographed animals in the Caribbean. The origin remains genuinely unknown.

A full day by speedboat through the Exuma Cays — Compass Cay (where nurse sharks circle the dock in 1m of water and can be touched), Leaf Cay (a beach with a colony of 200+ Allen’s cays iguana — a species found only in the Exumas, resembling a miniature dinosaur), the Thunderball Grotto (the cave used in the James Bond films “Thunderball” and “Never Say Never Again”, swimmable at low tide).

💡 Thunderball Grotto at Staniel Cay is accessible by snorkelling through an underwater entrance at low tide, emerging in an air-filled chamber lit by shafts of sunlight through holes in the limestone roof. It was used in the 1965 Bond film “Thunderball” (as Palmyra) and the 1983 “Never Say Never Again.” The coral inside is entirely undamaged.

35-min flight from GGT to North Eleuthera (ELH). Eleuthera — 180km long and 1.5–3km wide, the thinnest island in the world — is the finest island for experiencing the difference between the calm turquoise west coast (Caribbean) and the dramatic dark-blue surf of the Atlantic east coast, separated in places by just 50m of rock.

💡 Glass Window Bridge on Eleuthera is the narrowest point of the island — a bridge over a rock cut where the dark blue Atlantic and the turquoise Bight of Eleuthera are separated by 9m of land. In a strong Atlantic swell, waves wash over both sides of the bridge simultaneously; the colour contrast between the two bodies of water is abrupt and genuinely striking.

20 min ferry from North Eleuthera. Harbour Island (“Briland”) — a 4.8km² island with 200-year-old clapboard houses in pastel colours, the finest pink sand beach in the world (Pink Sand Beach — 5km, the pink colour from crushed foraminifera shells, a microscopic organism with pink calcium carbonate shells) and golf carts as the only vehicle on the island.

💡 Pink Sand Beach gets its colour from Homotrema rubrum — a tiny red-pink marine organism that lives in large numbers in the reef surrounding the island. The shells are continually ground up by wave action and deposited on the beach, mixing with white coral sand to produce the pink hue. The colour is most intense in morning light.

A morning on Harbour Island by golf cart (the only vehicle allowed — the island has no cars) — the colonial Dunmore Town (named after Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor who fled Revolutionary America and established himself here in 1787), the Methodist church (1843) and the pastel-painted shotgun houses. Fly from ELH or GGT back to Nassau, then international connections.

💡 Harbour Island was the original capital of the Bahamas before Nassau — Dunmore Town was the most important settlement in the northern Bahamas in the late 18th century. The Loyalists who fled American independence after 1783 established themselves here; their clapboard architecture with picket fences has barely changed since.