Bahamian Culture

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GUIDES

The Bahamian Belief in the Healing Power of Sea Air

The Bahamian belief in the healing power of sea air is not a marketing slogan or a vague sense that beaches feel nice. It is a specific, culturally grounded conviction with roots stretching back before Columbus, reshaped by slavery, Christianity, and the persistence of African-derived spiritual practices. Understanding where this belief comes from — and how it lives today — means untangling several layers of island history that most visitors never see. Over 96 percent of Bahamians identify as Christian, yet the belief in sea air as medicine persists across religious lines — a quiet testament to older ways

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Why Sunday Still Shuts Down Much of the Out Islands

Sunday in the Out Islands of the Bahamas follows a rhythm that feels older than the power lines strung across the cays. On Cat Island in June 2026, that rhythm was broken not by a change in custom but by a turbocharger failure on an engine at the local power station. The resulting blackout lasted nearly 22 hours, forcing the cancellation of the closing night of the Rake & Scrape Festival — a loss felt well beyond the island’s 1,500 permanent residents. That single event captures the question this article explores: why does Sunday still shut down so much

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Why Out Island Funerals Are Community Events, Not Private Ones

By December 29, 2020, The Bahamas had confirmed 7,857 COVID-19 cases and 170 deaths. Funeral homes on New Providence and the Out Islands stored bodies for months as families postponed services, hoping to hold the community funerals their traditions demand. When Gwendolyn Merlene Hanna’s family held a private committal service on Friday, April 3, 2020, they did so hours before Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis announced a complete weekend lockdown. It was a practical decision during a crisis. But for many other Bahamians, especially those from the Out Islands, the choice was harder: hold a private service immediately or

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The Bahamian Tradition of Naming Storms After They Pass

In the Bahamas, a hurricane doesn’t arrive with a name already assigned by a committee in Geneva. It earns one afterward—something descriptive, often funny, sometimes biting—based on what it actually did. A storm that stripped every coconut palm on a particular cay might be remembered as “Coconut Cutter.” Another that flooded the goat pen becomes “Nanny’s Revenge.” This is not a tourist attraction or a marketing gimmick. It is a living oral tradition, one that sits alongside the archipelago’s deep storytelling culture—a culture that folklorists Zora Neale Hurston and Elsie Cleo Parsons spent years documenting in the early twentieth

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Inside the World of Competitive Bahamian Sailing Families

In the 2025 National Family Island Regatta, the A-Class sloop Tida Wave was running second when Legend from Long Island collided with it, tearing a massive hole in the mainsail. The captain later told reporters he didn’t see the tear at first — his eyes were on Legend. Nobody on the boat suggested stopping. Two crew members grabbed the shredded canvas and held it together by hand, creating a makeshift sail on the fly, and the boat crossed the finish line for third place. That kind of resolve doesn’t come from a playbook. It comes from families who have

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The Bahamian Art of Making Something From Almost Nothing

Inside a former slaughterhouse on New Providence, artists build structures fifteen feet high — not from steel or stone, but from cardboard, metal, and colored felt paper. This is the raw material of Junkanoo, and it’s also a metaphor for how Bahamian culture has long operated: transforming the discarded, the salvaged, the humble into something monumental. On a small island nation with a population of roughly 400,000, the impulse to make something from almost nothing runs deep. It shows up in the annual Junkanoo parades, where elaborate floats built from scrap materials compete for prestige. It surfaces in contemporary

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Inside the Preservation Society Keeping Hope Town’s Hand Wound Lighthouse Alive

Every two hours, a lighthouse keeper climbs 101 steps, hand-cranks 700 pounds of iron weights, and keeps the world’s last hand-wound kerosene beacon burning — a ritual unchanged since 1863. On Elbow Cay in the Abaco islands, the Elbow Reef Lighthouse has guided ships through the coral reefs for over 160 years. It is the only active lighthouse in the world that remains manually wound and kerosene-burning. The lighthouse keeper must rewind the lens-turning mechanism every two hours by cranking 700-pound iron weights housed in the hollow central column. This is not a tourist reenactment. It is the real,

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The Quiet Tradition of Bahamian Boat Naming Superstitions

A boat’s name isn’t a label. It’s a prayer, a promise, and a record that the sea never forgets.” That’s how one Long Island fisherman explained why he still whispers a libation over his skiff every time the registration changes hands. On a dock in George Town, Exuma, I watched a man in his sixties spend an afternoon sanding every trace of a previous boat name off a transom. He used a heat gun on the fiberglass, then a chemical stripper, then a fine grit. He removed the name from the life rings, the logbook, even a keychain fob.

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Inside the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas

On a Sunday afternoon in Nassau, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) sits quiet inside Villa Doyle, a restored 1860s mansion that once housed the colonial secretary. The contrast is the point. A building built during the height of British colonial administration now holds the country’s most important collection of Bahamian-made art — work that actively questions, reclaims, and reimagines that very history. Since its founding in 2003, the NAGB has become the central institution for understanding how Bahamian artists have grappled with identity, independence, and the legacy of empire. But a museum’s mission is never static.

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Why the Family Islands Consider Themselves the Real Bahamas

Of the more than 700 islands that make up the Bahamas, only about 20 are inhabited. And on a handful of those — the Abacos, the Exumas, Eleuthera, Cat Island — you will hear a quiet claim, spoken less as a boast than as a matter-of-fact correction: “This is the real Bahamas.” The speaker is usually a Bahamian whose family has lived on that island since the 18th century, and the statement is not about scenery. It is about a different relationship to the nation’s history, economy, and daily life — one that exists in deliberate contrast to the

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