Walk the Bay Street stretch of Nassau and the straw market reaches you before you see it: rows of stalls under an open roof, sellers calling across the aisle, the dry smell of straw and shell and sun-warmed wood. Hats, bags, mats, dolls, carvings and conch-shell jewellery sit in stacks a few steps from the jewellery shops and duty-free windows that line the same street.
“Many tourists refuse to come off the ship because they were told the market is too dark.” — Irene Rolle, straw market vendor, speaking in 2018
That sentence carries most of what makes this market worth understanding. It is a workplace for hundreds of vendors, a port attraction promoted by an authority, and a decade-long political argument, often all three at once.
In March 2025, Nassau Cruise Port and the Straw Market Authority launched a campaign called “Rooted in Tradition, Made in The Bahamas” to draw passengers toward those stalls. The campaign pairs events and digital content with the argument that buying here supports Bahamian artisans directly. Whether that argument holds depends on details most visitors never see: rent, lighting, fire safety, and who runs the place.
Nassau’s straw markets are craft markets and workplaces at the same time, and the two facts sit awkwardly together. Come for the straw work, the carvings and the conch-shell jewellery — but know that you are walking into an economy with a documented history of disputes over rent, lighting and fire safety, not a stage set.
Nassau also has more than one market, and they do not serve the same people or the same purpose. Confusing them is easy, because the word “market” covers a craft hall on Bay Street, a beachside fish table and a produce courtyard on Village Road.
The four below are the ones most often mixed up, and each keeps its own hours.
Two of these run on fixed weekly schedules; the Bay Street market trades every day.
| Market | Location | Opening pattern | Signature goods |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nassau Straw Market | Bay Street, Nassau | Daily, 8am to 8pm | Straw hats, bags, mats and dolls; wood carvings; conch-shell jewellery |
| Festival Place | Nassau | Daily from 8am | Bahamian crafts; coconut and pineapple tarts; hair braiding |
| Creative Nassau, Pompey Square | Pompey Square, Nassau | Wednesdays and Fridays, 9am to 5pm | Goatskin drums, conch jewellery, straw accessories, original paintings |
| Doongalik Farmer’s Market | 20 Village Road, Nassau | Saturdays, 9am to 1pm | Organic greens, cucumbers, sweet peppers, fruit sorbets, lion fish fillets, baked crab |
Craft and food trade in Nassau rarely share a venue, which is the first thing to understand before comparing them.
What Gets Made, and Who Makes It
The Bay Street market’s stock is what most visitors picture: woven straw hats and bags, floor mats, dolls, wood carvings, and jewellery cut from conch shell. Festival Place, a short walk away, concentrates craft stalls inside a single building.
Pompey Square adds a different register. Creative Nassau runs a market there with goatskin drums, conch jewellery, straw accessories and original paintings, all made by local artisans. Creative Nassau’s Pompey Square market is the one to check before planning a walk through central Nassau.
Published histories of the Bay Street market tend to pick up in the 1940s, describing rapid growth from that decade onward. What came before is harder to pin down, and the market’s documented institutional history is shorter than its public one.
At the Bay Street straw market, vendors are described as open to negotiation on price. Ask what something costs, then make a counter-offer once rather than accepting the first number.
The drums and handcrafted pieces sold across these venues overlap with the material culture of Bahamian festival traditions, which we cover in our guide to Junkanoo. What remains unsettled is how much of the money spent at these stalls stays with the people who make the goods, a question that rarely appears in the market’s own promotional material.
Rent, Audits and the Politics of a Market Stall
Behind the stalls runs a second story that seldom reaches visitor accounts. The Bay Street market is administered by the Straw Market Authority, a body established under the Straw Market Authority Act of 2011, and its finances, fire safety and rent collection have all been contested in public within the past decade.
Most of that record sits in parliamentary speeches and ministry reports rather than in tourism coverage, which is part of why it stays invisible to shoppers.
A Ministry of Works report and a police Fire Prevention Section report both warned that the Bay Street market was highly susceptible to fire and that its alarm system was deficient. Neither set of recommendations was carried out at the time.
Public Works Minister Desmond Bannister told the House of Assembly that the Authority’s accounts had gone unaudited for years and asked for a full audit. The findings he listed included missing records for vendor daycare fees and credit-card spending.
Authority staff discarded goods belonging to vendors said to be behind on rent, pushing long-running complaints into public view. Vendors also described going months without working lights in parts of the market.
Rent sits at the centre of the dispute. Stall holders were reported at the time to be paying roughly $37.50 a week, a figure that turns every slow cruise season into a direct hit on household income.
The common assumption that the Bay Street market is a state-run souvenir hall selling on the government’s behalf. It is a rent-paying vendor community trading inside a building administered by a statutory authority, and the two sides have clashed publicly over money and conditions.
What has not been resolved is whether the market’s underlying economics have changed at all. A marketing campaign can shift how a place looks to visitors without altering rent, lighting or vendor income.
Fish, Produce and Saturday Mornings
Nassau’s food trade runs on a different calendar and a different geography. Doongalik Farmer’s Market draws produce from local organic farms — Happy Farms supplies eggs, Sunset Organic Farms brings greens, kale and beets — alongside fruit sorbets, lion fish fillets and baked crab.
At Montagu Beach, vendors sell snapper, grouper, shrimp and lobster from iced coolers and wooden tables set on the sand, and some sell straight from their boats. Montagu’s fish tables also carry sour oranges, hot peppers and spices, and vendors will clean and scale a purchase for a small fee.
Potter’s Cay, beside the bridge to Paradise Island, works the same way at a smaller scale, with stalls piled high with seafood and produce drawn from local farms.
Opening hours across the food markets are specific rather than flexible, and the wider rhythm of scheduling in the islands is something we’ve written about separately in our piece on island time.
At Montagu Beach and Potter’s Cay, ask whether the vendor will clean and scale your fish before you pay. The service is normally offered on the spot for a small fee, and it is worth confirming the price first.
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The Village Road market is the one stop on this list with a hard deadline, closing at 1pm. The market’s own page carries current details on vendors and dates.
Both trade daily, both sell from coolers and tables, and both will prepare a purchase for a small fee. Potter’s Cay sits beside the Paradise Island bridge; Montagu spreads along the sand.
Guided options exist if you want someone else to handle the cooking and the explaining, including street food tours and wider food tours across Nassau.
Comparing Nassau’s Two Market Economies
Craft retail and food trade, side by side
Set the two trades against each other and the differences stop looking like taste and start looking like structure.
| Dimension | Craft and straw retail | Food and produce trade |
|---|---|---|
| Where it concentrates | Bay Street, Pompey Square, Festival Place | Montagu Beach, Potter’s Cay, Village Road |
| Typical goods | Straw bags, hats, mats and dolls; wood carvings; conch-shell jewellery | Snapper, grouper, shrimp, lobster; sour oranges, hot peppers, organic greens |
| Opening rhythm | Daily from 8am at the Bay Street market and Festival Place | Saturday mornings at Doongalik; daily trade at Montagu Beach |
| How buying works | Vendors described as open to negotiation on price | Fish cleaned and scaled for a small fee; some sellers work from their own boats |
Who the market serves, and who pays for it
The Bahamas recorded more passenger shore visits than any of 35 Caribbean and US destinations in the 2014–15 cruise season, yet ranked 16th for average spending per visitor. That gap is the backdrop to every argument about how much cruise traffic actually reaches Nassau’s vendors.
Irene Rolle, the vendor quoted at the top of this piece, told reporters she had paid for her own lighting rather than wait for repairs. A second vendor, who had worked in the market for 42 years, described the period as the first time in his experience that stall holders had been treated that way.
What visitors get wrong
Treating “the straw market” as a single place. Bay Street, Festival Place and Pompey Square are separate venues with separate operators and hours, and the food trade runs through different sites again. A plan built around one of them will miss the others entirely.
- Craft and food trade in Nassau occupy separate venues, separate hours and largely separate customer bases.
- The Bay Street market’s public reputation and its administrative record have diverged for most of a decade.
- Stall rent, lighting and fire safety remain the vendor-side issues that promotional campaigns do not address.
What Visitors Ask About Nassau’s Straw Markets
Can you bargain at the straw market?
Vendors at the Bay Street market are described as open to negotiation, so counter-offering is normal rather than rude.
Ask the price first, then name a figure once. The same bag or hat often appears at several stalls, so comparing two or three before you commit is reasonable.
Is the Bay Street market safe?
The complaints that surfaced in 2018 came from vendors themselves and concerned working conditions — lighting, cleanliness and rent — rather than crime against visitors.
Vendors publicly disputed the idea that passengers should stay away, and the market continues to trade daily on Bay Street beside the main shopping district.
What should you buy if you want Bahamian-made goods?
Start with straw work — hats, bags, mats and dolls — then look at wood carvings, conch-shell jewellery and goatskin drums.
Festival Place and Pompey Square concentrate artisan stalls in central Nassau, and the goods sold there are made by Bahamian craftspeople rather than imported for resale.
Where do Bahamians buy fish and produce?
Montagu Beach and Potter’s Cay are the two seafood landmarks, with vendors selling from iced coolers, tables and sometimes their own boats.
Doongalik’s Saturday market covers produce and prepared food, and our guide to conch and Bahamian cooking follows what happens to the catch next.
Why a Market Stall Tells You More Than a Souvenir
Nassau’s straw markets get described as places to buy a memory of The Bahamas. They read better as a measure of the country’s working life: a craft trade of makers selling what they or their neighbours produce, a food economy that still moves through beach tables and bridge-side shacks, and a public argument about who benefits from the ships that dock each week. Buy something and you are inside that argument rather than outside it, which is the same pattern of family-centred enterprise we looked at in the Bahamian homecoming.
Sources and further reading
Cruise Radio. “Report: Cruisers Fearful of Bahamas Straw Market.” 2018. 🔗
Magnetic Media. “Minister Exposes Financial Slackness at Straw Market Authority, Says Site Still at Risk for Fire.” 2017. 🔗
Magnetic Media. “Nassau Cruise Port and Straw Market Authority Unveil Rooted in Tradition, Made in The Bahamas Campaign.” 2025. 🔗
Culture Trip. “The 10 Best Markets in Nassau.” 🔗
Related reading on IslandHopperGuides
Exploring the Rich History of Fort Fincastle — the hilltop fort above downtown Nassau, a short walk from the Bay Street market.
Celebrating Bahamian Heritage With Stunning Historical Images — visual context for how Nassau’s commercial streets have changed.
Regattas and Rivalry: Sailing Towards National Pride in the Bahamas — another Bahamian trade built on craft, rivalry and family crews.
Explore Places to Stay in the Bahamas
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