The Bahamas: 700 Islands Strung Across a Turquoise Sea

• Capital: Nassau, on the island of New Providence [1]
• Population: Around 410,000 [2]
• Area: 13,880 square kilometers, scattered across roughly 700 islands and 2,400 cays [1]
• Official language: English [1]
• Currency: Bahamian dollar (BSD), pegged 1:1 to the US dollar [1]
• Distinguishing claim: Home to Dean's Blue Hole, one of the deepest known underwater sinkholes on Earth at 202 meters [3]

I grew up thinking the Bahamas was a single beach. The kind you see on a postcard, with one palm tree and a hammock, sold to you as a getaway by an airline ad. Turns out it's a 700-island archipelago that stretches almost 800 miles, and only about thirty of those islands have any human population on them at all. The rest are sand, scrub, mangroves, and the kind of silence you don't get back home in Montana even on a Tuesday in February.

That mismatch between the postcard and the actual place is most of what makes the Bahamas interesting. The country is bigger than you think, weirder than you think, and a lot older than the all-inclusive resort on Paradise Island would have you believe.

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas on a small Bahamian island. The exact island is still debated, but most historians point to San Salvador, also called Watlings Island for a while, on the eastern edge of the chain [4]. The Lucayan people who greeted him had been living across the islands for around five centuries by then, having paddled up from the Greater Antilles. Within a generation of contact, the Lucayans were essentially gone, taken to work in Spanish mines on Hispaniola and replaced eventually by enslaved Africans, English settlers, American Loyalists fleeing the Revolution, and pirates.

The pirate part isn't just a marketing pitch. From roughly 1690 to 1718, Nassau was a functioning pirate republic. Blackbeard hung out there. So did Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read. The harbor was shallow enough for sloops but too shallow for the British Navy's larger warships, which made it close to perfect for crews that wanted to disappear with a hold full of stolen sugar. The party ended when Woodes Rogers showed up in 1718 with a royal pardon in one hand and a fleet in the other.

The Bahamas isn't really land. Most of what you're looking at is the top of an enormous shallow underwater plateau called the Bahama Banks. The water on top is famously turquoise because it's only a few meters deep over white limestone sand, which reflects sunlight back through the water and turns it a color most paint stores can't match.

But right next to those shallows, the seafloor drops. Hard. The Tongue of the Ocean, between Andros and New Providence, plunges over 2,000 meters straight down. Andros Island, the largest in the country at over 5,900 square kilometers, is itself riddled with blue holes, vertical underwater caves that punch down through the limestone. Dean's Blue Hole, off Long Island, drops 202 meters and is one of the most popular freediving sites on the planet [3]. Champion freedivers go down on a single breath. I had to look this up twice to make sure the number was right.

There is a small uninhabited island called Big Major Cay in the Exuma chain. It is populated entirely by pigs. Nobody is completely sure how they got there. The most repeated story is that sailors dropped them off planning to come back later, and didn't. Whatever the origin, the pigs swim out to greet boats now, because tourists feed them, and a swimming pig is exactly as ridiculous and charming as it sounds [5].

Big Major isn't the only oddity. Andros has the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Inagua, way down south, has roughly 80,000 West Indian flamingos, which is most of the global population. Bimini sits about 50 miles off the Florida coast and was Hemingway's favorite fishing ground. The country is mostly water, mostly underrated, and the wildlife list keeps surprising you.

Bahamian music doesn't always travel under its own name, but it travels. Junkanoo, the country's signature street parade, traces back to enslaved Africans who were given a few days off around Christmas and turned them into one of the loudest, most percussive festivals in the Caribbean. Goombah drums, cowbells, brass horns, and elaborate costumes built from cardboard and crepe paper. It's still the biggest cultural event of the Bahamian year, held on Boxing Day and New Year's Day in Nassau.

The country also produced rake-and-scrape, a folk style built around an accordion, a goatskin drum, and a carpenter's saw played with a screwdriver. Which is, when you think about it, what you'd get if a bluegrass band moved to the islands and ran out of instruments.

Geographically, the Bahamas sits in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Caribbean Sea. Culturally and politically, it is grouped with the Caribbean and is a member of CARICOM. So the answer most travel agents give, "yes, kind of", is actually correct.

The Bahamas is made up of about 700 islands and roughly 2,400 smaller cays and rocks. Only around 30 of those islands are inhabited. New Providence, where Nassau is, holds about 70 percent of the country's population.

The official language is English, inherited from the country's history as a British colony. Most Bahamians also speak Bahamian Creole, an English-based creole with West African and Caribbean influences, in everyday conversation.

Yes, by Caribbean standards. Almost everything is imported, the Bahamian dollar is pegged to the US dollar, and tourism is the primary industry. Food, fuel, and lodging tend to run noticeably higher than in neighboring Caribbean nations.

The Bahamas gained independence from the United Kingdom on July 10, 1973, after about 325 years of British colonial rule. It remains a member of the Commonwealth and recognizes the British monarch as its head of state.

1. The World Factbook: Bahamas, The
2. World Bank: Bahamas Population
3. Smithsonian Magazine: Inside Dean's Blue Hole
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica: Columbus's First Voyage
5. National Geographic: The Swimming Pigs of the Bahamas