Bahamian Spots

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GUIDES

Leaf Cay Exuma Home to the Bahamas Rock Iguanas

The first thing you notice is the way they move. Slow, deliberate, prehistoric — emerging from scrubland and limestone crevices as your boat cuts the engine in the shallows. You’re not on a movie set. You’re at Leaf Cay, a speck of white sand and turquoise water in the central Exumas, and you’re about to meet one of the rarest reptiles on the planet. Fewer than five thousand Bahamian rock iguanas remain across all colonies — Leaf Cay is one of their last strongholds. Leaf Cay — often called Iguana Island — sits a few miles south of Staniel

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Powell Cay Abaco an Anchorage Sailors Swear By

Powell Cay’s Atlantic reef offers visibility often exceeding eighty feet — some of the best snorkeling in the Northern Abacos. Powell Cay’s Atlantic reef offers visibility often exceeding eighty feet — some of the best snorkeling in the Northern Abacos. Emily’s Take Is Powell Cay worth anchoring at for a few days? Yes — if you’re fully self-sufficient and keep an eye on the weather. The holding varies, there are zero facilities, and a westerly wind shift can chase you out. But in settled conditions, the solitude, the reef snorkeling, and the bluff views make it one of the

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Guana Cay’s Nature Reserve Beyond the Beach Bar Crowds

Most people arrive at Great Guana Cay with one destination in mind: Nipper’s, the legendary beach bar where the rum flows and the music never stops. But walk a few hundred yards north along the same stretch of sand and the crowd vanishes, replaced by a seven-mile ribbon of Atlantic shoreline that ranks among the longest unbroken beaches in the Bahamas. The real draw here isn’t the party — it’s what happens when you leave it behind. The barrier reef off Great Guana Cay is one of the most accessible reef snorkelling destinations in the Abacos — on calm

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Man O War Cay’s Turquoise Harbor Lined With Working Boats

From the water, Man O War Cay doesn’t announce itself with flash. The turquoise harbor melts into the Abaco sky, and the first thing you register isn’t a resort or a row of beach umbrellas — it’s the boat sheds. Open-sided structures where the rasp of sanding and the tap of hammers carry across the glass-calm water. This narrow 2.5-mile sliver of pine and sand, settled by Loyalists in the late 1700s, holds a population of 215 residents and a boat-building tradition that has passed down through seven generations. Albury Brothers’ Man-O-War facility builds six to eight boats per

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Little Inagua an Uninhabited Island Even Bahamians Rarely Visit

Little Inagua sits low on the horizon, a 31,600-acre slab of limestone and scrub where no one lives and almost no one lands. It is the largest uninhabited island in the Caribbean, and it has stayed that way because it lacks the single thing every settlement needs: fresh water. At 31,600 acres, Little Inagua is the largest uninhabited island in the Caribbean — a national park with no trails, no staff, and no fresh water. Emily’s Take Little Inagua is worth visiting if you’re after true wilderness — the kind where you carry every drop of water and every

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Union Creek Inagua a Wetland Worth the Long Journey

From the air, Great Inagua looks like a flat green disc floating in turquoise — and somewhere along its northwest coast, a tidal creek called Union Creek cuts into the mangroves. For more than fifty years, that narrow waterway has hosted one of the longest continuous sea-turtle research programs on the planet, a joint project of the Bahamas National Trust and the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research at the University of Florida. Getting there takes planning, a charter flight, and a bumpy ride from Matthew Town. But for anyone who wants to see endangered green and hawksbill

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Simms Long Island a Village Frozen Somewhere in the 1970s

From the outside, the white clapboard chapel at Simms doesn’t look much different than it did fifty years ago — or a hundred. The wooden pews, the graveyard out back, the road that turns from pavement to dirt a few hundred yards away. It’s the kind of place that makes you check your watch, then check it again, because nothing here seems to have changed in decades. Simms has no hotels, no restaurants, no shops — and roughly 100 residents, many of them direct descendants of the family that founded the settlement. That’s the pull of Simms, the southernmost

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Clarence Town Long Island Where Two Historic Churches Face the Sea

Clarence Town wraps around a calm pale-blue harbour on Long Island’s southeastern coast, where twin church spires rise above low pastel buildings and frame a working waterfront that has barely changed in generations. Twin church spires rise roughly 40 feet above the harbour, offering sweeping views of the settlement, turquoise water, and the cays dotting the coastline. That statistic — the height of the towers at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Catholic Church — is the kind of detail that sticks with you after a visit here. Clarence Town is the administrative capital of Long Island, home to roughly

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Devil’s Point Cat Island for Travelers Chasing the Unusual

Cat Island doesn’t announce itself. There’s no welcome sign, no duty-free arcade, no high-rise lobby. What you get instead is a 150-mile-long stretch of Bahamian out-island where the highest point in the country—all 206 feet of it—doubles as a hand-built monastery, and the local music rhythm comes from scraping a carpenter’s saw against a knife. At 206 feet, Mount Alvernia is the highest point in The Bahamas. At its summit sits a stone hermitage built by hand in 1939 by a priest who sought solitude. This is the Bahamas beyond the postcard. Cat Island sits in the central Out

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Old Bight Cat Island Beneath the Shadow of Mount Alvernia

Mount Alvernia rises 206 feet above sea level as the highest natural point in The Bahamas — a modest hill that carries an outsized sense of place. The Hermitage crowns Cat Island’s Mount Alvernia, a miniature medieval monastery hand-carved from native stone by Father Jerome in 1939. Old Bight sits in the shadow of that hill, on the calm western shore of Cat Island. If you’re looking for the Bahamas at its most raw and quiet — where a hand-built monastery draws pilgrims, where beaches run for miles without footprints, and where a scrappy musical tradition still holds the

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