60 Fun Facts About Bahamas

Nassau, the capital and largest city of the Bahamas, sits on which island?

Nassau sits on New Providence, one of the smaller main islands at about 80 square miles, yet home to well over half of all Bahamians.

Roughly how many islands make up the Bahamas?

Roughly 700 islands make up the Bahamas, plus a couple of thousand rocky cays, yet people live on only about 30 of them.

Which imaginary line crosses the middle of the Bahamas?

The Tropic of Cancer cuts across the middle of the chain, so Nassau and the northern islands, palm trees and all, lie just outside the tropics.

Who represented the Queen at the Bahamas' 1973 independence ceremony?

Prince Charles, then a 24-year-old naval officer, arrived aboard the frigate he was serving on and watched the Union Jack lowered for the last time just before midnight, when the new Bahamian flag went up.

Which British territory shares the Bahamas' island chain?

Turks and Caicos completes the Lucayan Archipelago and was run from the Bahamas more than once, getting its own governor only when its bigger neighbour became independent in 1973.

What did the Lucayans call the island Columbus named San Salvador in 1492?

The Lucayans called it Guanahaní; which modern island that was is still debated, and Watling's Island was officially renamed San Salvador only in the 1920s, to match the favoured theory.

Which Bahamian rodent was believed extinct until a colony was found on a remote cay in the 1960s?

The hutia, a rabbit-sized rodent found only in the Bahamas, was written off as extinct until a colony turned up on East Plana Cay; conservationists have since moved some to other cays.

Tourist guides often trace the name 'Bahamas' to Spanish words meaning what?

'Shallow sea' is the usual gloss: guides derive 'Bahamas' from the Spanish 'baja mar', though scholars dispute the claim and some prefer a Lucayan origin for the name.

The Eleutheran Adventurers, the Bahamas' first permanent English settlers, arrived from where?

The Eleutheran Adventurers sailed from Bermuda in the late 1640s: Puritans led by William Sayle who were at odds with the island's authorities and wanted to worship as they chose.

The Puritan settlers named their new island Eleuthera, which comes from the Greek word for what?

Eleuthera is the feminine form of the Greek eleutheros, 'Free', chosen by Puritan settlers who had left their old colony in the 1640s to escape religious control.

Which former privateer arrived at Nassau in 1718 as governor and ended the pirates' republic?

Woodes Rogers reached Nassau in July 1718 carrying a royal pardon for pirates who submitted; his first term left him bankrupt and in a debtors' prison, yet he was sent back for a second and died in office.

Which marooned sailor, said to have inspired Robinson Crusoe, did the Bahamas' future governor rescue in 1709?

Alexander Selkirk was taken off Juan Fernández Island in February 1709 by a privateering expedition that went on to capture a Spanish treasure ship and circle the globe; its commander later governed the Bahamas.

Which pirate accepted the king's pardon in 1718 and then hunted his former comrades for the Bahamas' governor?

Benjamin Hornigold was sent out by the new governor to hunt his old comrades; Charles Vane outran him, but the ten pirates he did bring back were tried in Nassau and most were hanged.

Before it was renamed in 1695 to honour King William III, what was Nassau called?

Charles Town, named for Charles II, was rebuilt after a Spanish raid in 1684 and renamed for William's Dutch family, the House of Nassau.

Which motto did the Bahamas carry before its present coat of arms?

'Piracy expelled, commerce restored' translates the Latin 'Expulsis piratis restituta commercia' on the colonial badge, where a British ship chases off two pirate vessels; the modern arms carry 'Forward, Upward, Onward Together' instead.

Which group did Britain resettle in the Bahamas in their thousands after the American Revolution?

Loyalists and their slaves arrived in their thousands on British land grants and planted cotton, but worn-out soil and insect pests soon ruined the crop.

What made Nassau briefly rich during the American Civil War?

Blockade running for the Confederacy turned Nassau into a boomtown: fast ships slipped cotton out of Southern ports and ran arms and luxuries back in past the Union navy.

Which former British king served as Governor of the Bahamas during the Second World War?

Edward VIII, by then the Duke of Windsor, governed from 1940 to 1945; he had given up the throne in 1936 to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, who came to Nassau with him.

Who served as the first prime minister of an independent Bahamas, holding office from 1973 to 1992?

Lynden Pindling led the Bahamas to majority rule in 1967 and then to independence, and his party stayed in power for 25 years; Nassau's international airport now carries his name.

Who became the first Bahamian to serve as governor-general, three weeks after independence in 1973?

Sir Milo Butler took over on 1 August 1973 from the last British governor, who had stayed on for three weeks as the first governor-general; Butler held the post until his death in 1979.

What was the nickname of the white merchant elite behind the United Bahamian Party?

'The Bay Street Boys' took their name from Nassau's main commercial street; the white merchant clique ran the colony until the Progressive Liberal Party's 1967 election win brought majority rule.

The Bahamian currency is held at a fixed one-to-one exchange rate with which foreign currency?

The US dollar circulates alongside the Bahamian dollar, which is pegged to it at par; both are accepted interchangeably on every island, so American visitors never need to change money.

Which tax are residents of the Bahamas spared?

Income tax on wages doesn't exist in the Bahamas, and that low-tax regime drew the banks and trust companies that made it an offshore finance hub; import duties and VAT pay the government's bills instead.

What colour is the triangle at the hoist of the Bahamian flag?

The hoist triangle is Black, standing for the vigour and force of a united people; the gold stripe represents the sun and the land's resources, the aquamarine stripes the surrounding sea.

Which two animals support the shield on the Bahamian coat of arms?

'A marlin and a flamingo' support the shield: the blue marlin is the Bahamas' national fish and the flamingo its national bird, standing for the sea and the land of the islands.

Which ship is depicted on the shield of the Bahamian coat of arms?

The Santa María, Columbus's flagship, sails across the shield on wavy blue-and-silver waves beneath a rising golden sun, recalling his 1492 landfall in the islands.

What is the national flower of the Bahamas?

Yellow elder, a shrub with trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, was chosen partly because favourites such as hibiscus and bougainvillea had already been claimed as national flowers by other countries.

Which extremely dense hardwood, once prized for ship bearings, is the national tree of the Bahamas?

Lignum vitae is so dense it sinks in water, and its self-lubricating wood was turned into bearings for ship propeller shafts; the Bahamas adopted it as its national tree.

What is the highest point in the Bahamas, rising only 63 metres on Cat Island?

Mount Alvernia, known locally as Como Hill, is crowned by the Hermitage, a miniature stone monastery that the priest and trained architect Father Jerome built there in 1939.

Which island is by far the largest in the Bahamas?

Andros covers about 2,300 square miles yet has fewer than 10,000 residents, while most Bahamians crowd onto an island roughly one-thirtieth its size.

What is the deep-water trench west of Nassau where the US Navy tests its submarines called?

The Tongue of the Ocean drops more than a mile right beside shallow banks, and reefs and shoals shield it from open-ocean noise, which is why the US Navy tests submarines and sonar there.

Uninhabited Big Major Cay is famous for a beach populated by a colony of feral, swimming what?

Nobody is sure how they got there; sailors, shipwrecks and a planned barbecue have all been blamed, and the pigs now paddle out to greet tour boats for food.

Dean's Blue Hole, one of the world's deepest sea sinkholes, lies off which Bahamian island?

Dean's Blue Hole sits in a bay west of Clarence Town on Long Island and plunges about 200 metres; freedivers have set world records there at the annual Vertical Blue contest.

The final scene of The Silence of the Lambs was filmed on which Bahamian island, the closest to the US?

Bimini, about 50 miles off Florida, hosted the film's closing phone-call scene; it was also Ernest Hemingway's big-game fishing base in the 1930s and was linked by Ponce de León's chroniclers to the Fountain of Youth.

Freeport, the second-largest city in the Bahamas, is a free-trade zone on which island?

Freeport was carved out of Grand Bahama's pine forest and swamp after the 1955 Hawksbill Creek Agreement gave the American financier Wallace Groves the land and a promise of no taxes.

Which hurricane parked over the northern Bahamas for a day in 2019, the strongest ever recorded there?

Dorian struck the Abacos with 185 mph winds, matching the strongest Atlantic landfall then on record, and crawled west for a day, leaving about $3.4 billion in damage.

Which hotelier reopened the Paradise Island resort as Atlantis in 1998?

Sol Kerzner, a South African hotelier, bought the Paradise Island resort in 1994 and relaunched it as Atlantis, opening the Royal Towers in 1998; it had earlier passed from Donald Trump to Merv Griffin.

Nassau's $4 billion Baha Mar resort, opened in 2017, was financed mainly by a bank from which country?

The Export-Import Bank of China financed Baha Mar and state-owned China Construction America built it; after its developer went bankrupt, it finally opened in April 2017 with only one hotel, the Grand Hyatt.

On which Bahamian island was the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival supposed to take place?

The site was on Great Exuma; guests promised luxury villas found disaster-relief tents and cheese sandwiches, and organiser Billy McFarland was later sentenced to six years for wire fraud.

Which 1965 James Bond film sends 007 to Nassau to track down SPECTRE's Emilio Largo?

Thunderball's underwater battle scenes were shot in Bahamian waters off Nassau, and actor Earl Cameron plays Bond's local contact Pinder; Largo's yacht, the Disco Volante, was a converted hydrofoil.

For which film did Bahamian-raised Sidney Poitier become the first Black Best Actor Oscar winner in 1964?

Lilies of the Field, in which he plays a handyman who helps German nuns build a chapel, won Poitier the 1964 Oscar; raised on Cat Island, he later served as the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan.

In which US city was Sidney Poitier born to visiting Bahamian parents?

Poitier was born in Miami in February 1927 while his parents were there selling tomatoes; he arrived two months premature and was not expected to survive, and the family soon returned to their farm on Cat Island.

Junkanoo, the Bahamas' costumed street parade, is traditionally held on New Year's Day and which other date?

Boxing Day brings the first of the two great Junkanoo parades; the festival is widely believed to go back to the Christmas days off once allowed to enslaved Africans.

Which Bahamian folk music is played on a carpenter's saw, a goatskin drum and an accordion?

Rake-and-scrape is the Bahamas' home-grown folk music: a carpenter's saw bent and scraped with a screwdriver keeps the rhythm beside a goombay drum and an accordion, and Cat Island hosts an annual festival for it.

Which Bahamian sprinter won the women's 400 metres at both the 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo Olympics?

Shaunae Miller-Uibo's Rio win came with a desperate dive across the line to beat Allyson Felix; in Tokyo she won by nearly a second in 48.36 seconds.

Which Bahamian won the men's 400 metres at the 2019 Worlds and then Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020?

Steven Gardiner beat Colombia's Anthony Zambrano into second at both the Doha worlds and the Tokyo Games; a day after his Olympic win, the women's 400 metres also went to a Bahamian.

In which sport did Durward Knowles win the Bahamas' first Olympic gold medal, at Tokyo 1964?

Sailing's Star class brought Knowles and crewmate Cecil Cooke the gold; in 1948 he had raced for Great Britain because the Bahamas had no Olympic committee yet.

Which host city's Olympics did the Bahamas boycott, the only Summer Games it missed between 1952 and 2024?

Moscow 1980 is the one gap in a run that began at Helsinki in 1952: the Bahamas joined the American-led boycott that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Which American college sport began staging a postseason game at Nassau's national stadium in 2014?

College football's Bahamas Bowl debuted at Thomas Robinson Stadium in 2014, when Western Kentucky led 49-14 and still only just held off Central Michigan, 49-48.

The Bahamas' winter ban on Nassau grouper protects spawning gatherings timed to which natural event?

The full moon of midwinter draws Nassau grouper to the same sites in their thousands, which made them easy to fish out; the Bahamas now closes the fishery from December to February.

In Bahamian cooking, what is 'switcha'?

A lime-based lemonade, switcha is made with native limes, sugar and water and is the everyday soft drink to go with conch fritters; Kalik is the local beer for grown-ups.

Which fruit is rolled into duff, the boiled-dough dessert Bahamians serve with a rum butter sauce?

Guava is spiralled through the dough like a jelly roll, then the whole thing is bagged and boiled like a British pudding, a leftover of colonial days.

What did Lukku-Cairi, the name the Bahamas' first inhabitants gave themselves, mean?

'People of the islands' is the meaning; the Spanish turned the name into Lucayos, English into Lucayan, and the Taino word for a small island lives on in English as 'cay'.

Slave raiders emptied the Bahamas of its Lucayan people by shipping most to which island?

Hispaniola's gold mines took most of the Lucayans; within about 25 years of the first landing none were left, and the Bahamas lay all but empty until English settlers arrived in the 1640s.

Which company has run Great Inagua's saltworks in the Bahamas since the 1950s?

Morton Salt bought the Great Inagua works in the 1950s; sun and wind do the rest, evaporating seawater in one of North America's largest solar salt operations, the island's main employer.

The 1841 Creole slave revolt, which ended in Nassau, inspired which abolitionist's only work of fiction?

Frederick Douglass built The Heroic Slave around Madison Washington, who led the Creole takeover; British officials in Nassau, where slavery was already abolished, let the captives go.

Which Florida people, many of African descent, fled in the 1820s and founded the Bahamian village of Red Bays?

Seminoles and the escaped slaves who lived among them crossed the Gulf Stream after the United States took over Florida in 1821; their descendants at Red Bays weave baskets in the Seminole style.

Whose 1992 win ended 25 years of Progressive Liberal Party rule in the Bahamas?

Hubert Ingraham, once a minister in the PLP government he toppled, won again in 1997, saw his party lose to Perry Christie in 2002 and came back for a third term in 2007.

What is the elected lower house of the Bahamian parliament called?

The House of Assembly is the elected lower chamber of the Bahamas' bicameral parliament, first summoned in 1729; it sits in Nassau's Parliament Square beside an appointed Senate, and the prime minister must command its majority.

Which regional bloc is the Bahamas a full member of, while staying out of its single market?

CARICOM counts the Bahamas as a full member even though the islands lie in the Atlantic, not the Caribbean Sea; it takes part in the bloc's political work but has stayed out of the single market.