The Bahamas: Ten Attractions and Natural Wonders

An archipelago, not a beach

The Bahamas is around 700 islands and 2,000 cays scattered across 800 kilometres of shallow, luminous sea southeast of Florida. Only about 30 are inhabited. Most visitors get no further than Nassau and Paradise Island, but the archipelago's real character is on the "Family Islands" — quiet, strung-out places with a settlement or two, a bonefish flat, and a wall of coral offshore.

The ten below run from the busy capital to some very remote spots. Getting around means small planes, mail boats, or a charter. It is dry and breezy November to April; the hurricane season is June to November.

1. Nassau's old town

Nassau, on New Providence island, is the capital and the arrival point for the cruise ships. Its historic core is compact: the salmon-pink Georgian parliament buildings around Rawson Square, the colonial-era Graycliff and government house, Christ Church Cathedral, and the straw market on Bay Street. The Pirates of Nassau museum leans into the town's early-1700s spell as a buccaneer republic.

It is easily walked in a morning, and a stronger reason to linger than its reputation as a duty-free shopping stop suggests.

2. The forts of Nassau

Three British colonial forts guard the capital. Fort Charlotte, the largest, sits on a rise west of downtown with a rock-cut moat, dungeons, and a view over the harbour. Fort Fincastle, shaped like a paddle-steamer, stands on the town's highest point, reached by the Queen's Staircase — 65 steps cut by enslaved labourers down through a limestone gorge.

None saw a battle, which is part of the story: the town changed hands by negotiation and raid rather than siege. Entry is cheap and the guides are lively.

3. Junkanoo

Junkanoo is the national festival: an all-night parade of "rushing" groups in towering costumes of crepe paper and cardboard, moving down Bay Street to a wall of goatskin drums, cowbells, whistles, and brass. The main parades are in the small hours of 26 December and 1 January, with competitions and months of secret preparation behind them.

The tradition goes back to the days of slavery, when the Christmas holiday was one of the few times off. A year-round museum in Nassau displays past costumes.

4. Atlantis, Paradise Island

Love it or not, Atlantis is the single biggest thing in the Bahamas: a sprawling pink resort on Paradise Island with water slides, a lazy river, open-air pools full of sharks and rays, the ruins-themed "Dig" aquarium, and one of the largest casinos in the Caribbean. Day passes let non-guests use the water park.

Paradise Island also has the quiet Versailles-style Cloisters garden and the excellent white sand of Cabbage Beach, which runs on well beyond the resort.

5. The Exuma swimming pigs

On an uninhabited cay in the Exumas, a colony of feral pigs has learned that boats mean food and now wades — and paddles — out to meet them. Nobody is quite sure how the pigs got there; the result is one of the Bahamas' most photographed oddities, and the anchor of a whole day-trip industry out of Staniel Cay and Nassau.

The same trips usually take in Thunderball Grotto, a snorkelling cave used in a James Bond film, and swimming with nurse sharks at Compass Cay.

6. The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park

Established in 1958 and made fully no-take in 1986, this park protects a 40-mile chain of uninhabited cays and the water around them. It is credited with helping restock conch, grouper, and spiny lobster across the region, and it is a stunning place to sail: mooring buoys at Warderick Wells, hiking trails, blue holes, and reefs with no fishing pressure.

You need a boat — bareboat charter, crewed yacht, or a long day trip — and there are no shops, so you carry everything in.

7. Pink Sands Beach, Harbour Island

Harbour Island, a small cay off the north end of Eleuthera, has a three-mile beach of genuinely pink sand, tinted by the crushed shells of a red reef organism. The island's only village, Dunmore Town, is a pastel New England-meets-Caribbean settlement of clapboard cottages and golf carts (there are almost no cars), and it has become one of the most fashionable small islands in the Caribbean.

Eleuthera itself, long and thin, has the Glass Window Bridge — where the deep-blue Atlantic and the pale bank almost touch — and miles of empty beach.

8. Dean's Blue Hole, Long Island

Tucked into a bay on Long Island, Dean's Blue Hole is a near-perfect circle of navy water dropping about 202 metres into the seabed — for years the deepest known ocean blue hole, and still the deepest that is so easy to reach: you can wade in from the beach. It hosts a world free-diving championship, but casual snorkellers just float over the edge and watch the bottom fall away.

Long Island is otherwise very quiet — bluffs, caves, and one long road down its spine.

9. Lucayan National Park, Grand Bahama

On Grand Bahama, this small park packs in pine forest, mangrove creek, a fine empty beach at Gold Rock, and the entrances to the Lucayan caverns — more than 10 kilometres of mapped underwater passages, among the longest in the world. Two of the dry caves are open to visitors on a short boardwalk; the remains of Lucayan people, the islands' original inhabitants, were found here.

It is about 40 minutes east of Freeport, the island's low-key main town.

10. Mount Alvernia Hermitage, Cat Island

On sleepy Cat Island, a Franciscan monk known as Father Jerome — a trained architect who built churches across the Bahamas — carved a scale-model stone monastery into the summit of Mount Alvernia by hand in the 1940s, and lived out his life there as a hermit. A Stations of the Cross path climbs the hill to it.

At 63 metres, this hilltop is the highest ground in the country. Cat Island around it is all quiet villages, pink-sand beaches, and rake-and-scrape music.

The Bahamas rewards picking one or two islands and staying put. Nassau plus one Family Island in a week gives you the capital's history and a taste of the empty, luminous archipelago that most visitors never see.