The Bahamas

The islands were home to the Lucayans, a Taíno people, when Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas here in 1492 — on an island in the Bahamas whose exact identity is still debated. Within a few decades the Spanish had enslaved and removed the entire Lucayan population to work elsewhere, and the islands were left empty.

English Puritans settled Eleuthera in 1648. Nassau became a pirate base in the early 1700s — the "Republic of Pirates," Blackbeard among them — until the crown reimposed control. Loyalist planters fleeing the American Revolution arrived in the 1780s with enslaved Africans and tried cotton, which failed; the population became overwhelmingly of African descent. Wrecking, blockade-running for the Confederacy, sponging, and Prohibition-era rum-running were successive island economies.

Majority rule came in 1967 under Lynden Pindling, and independence from Britain in 1973. The Bahamas is a Commonwealth realm with King Charles III as head of state and a stable two-party parliamentary democracy. Tourism and offshore finance now dominate the economy, and hurricanes — most recently Dorian in 2019 — are a recurring catastrophe.

Bahamian culture is Afro-Caribbean, English-speaking, and strongly Christian, with Baptist congregations especially numerous. The signature cultural event is Junkanoo, a masquerade street parade with towering crepe-paper costumes, cowbells, goatskin goombay drums, whistles, and brass, staged in the small hours of Boxing Day and New Year's Day with fierce competition between organised groups.

Music runs from Junkanoo rhythms to rake-and-scrape, played on a saw, accordion, and goombay drum. Sloop sailing is a point of pride, with island regattas — above all the Family Island Regatta at George Town — as major social occasions. Straw-plaiting is the traditional craft, sold at the markets in Nassau.

For a small country, the Bahamas has an outsized record in track and field, with Olympic sprint and relay medals, and Bahamian athletes are national heroes. Family, church, and the weekend gathering are the anchors of social life, especially on the quieter islands.

About seven in ten Bahamians live on New Providence, in and around Nassau, where cruise tourism — millions of passengers a year — stopover visitors, banking, and government drive the economy. Traffic, the high cost of imported goods, and unreliable, expensive electricity are constant complaints.

The Family Islands are a different world: small, close-knit communities living on fishing, boatbuilding, farming, and modest tourism, with populations that have lost people to Nassau and abroad. Many settlements have a few hundred residents, a church, a couple of shops, and a mail-boat dock.

A large Haitian migrant community, often in a precarious legal position, does much of the low-wage work in construction, gardening, and domestic service. Hurricane season, June to November, is watched closely every year; a single storm can undo decades of development on an island.

Conch — pronounced "conk" — is the national ingredient: cracked conch (battered and fried), conch fritters, and conch salad, a ceviche of raw conch "cooked" in lime and citrus with onion, sweet pepper, and tomato, made to order at a waterside shack. Rock lobster (called crawfish here), grouper fried whole, and stew fish are the other mainstays.

The standard sides are peas 'n' rice with pigeon peas, baked macaroni "pie", potato salad, and coleslaw. Souse, a light lime-and-pepper broth with chicken or pig's feet, is a weekend breakfast, often with "switcha" (limeade) and johnnycake. Guava duff, a rolled and boiled dessert with rum-butter sauce, is the classic pudding.

Kalik and Sands are the local beers, and Bahamian rum is in everything from a simple rum-and-Coke to the sweet Goombay Smash. The Friday-night fish fry — at Arawak Cay in Nassau, or village fish fries elsewhere — is a national ritual of grilled and fried seafood, sides, and music.

Nassau has the colonial core — Parliament Square, the Queen's Staircase, the old forts — the Straw Market, and, across the bridge, Paradise Island with the vast Atlantis resort and its water park and marine habitats. It is the easiest base but the least representative of the country.

The Exumas, a 120-mile chain of cays, hold the most famous scenery: the swimming pigs at Big Major Cay, the rock iguanas of Allen's Cay, Thunderball Grotto, and Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, one of the oldest marine protected areas in the world. Harbour Island, off Eleuthera, is known for its three-mile pink-sand beach.

Andros, the largest and least developed island, sits on the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean and is riddled with blue holes and fringed by a vast barrier reef, famous for bonefishing and diving. Long Island's Dean's Blue Hole is one of the deepest ocean blue holes and a freediving centre, and San Salvador draws divers for its walls and the Columbus monuments.