Bahamas

The Bahamas spread across shallow limestone banks between Florida and Cuba, hundreds of low islands and thousands of cays over turquoise water; the name probably comes from the Spanish baja mar, ‘shallow sea’. Andros is riddled with blue holes, and off its east coast the Tongue of the Ocean plunges to great depths. No hill rises far: Mount Alvernia on Cat Island, topped by a hermit’s stone monastery, is the summit of the country. Flamingos breed on Great Inagua.

Lucayan Taíno people met Columbus at his first landfall in the Americas, in October 1492, on an island they called Guanahani; within a generation the Spanish had carried nearly all of them off to Hispaniola. Puritans from Bermuda settled Eleuthera in 1648, and pirates such as Blackbeard used New Providence as a base until Woodes Rogers arrived as governor in 1718. Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution brought enslaved workers and cotton; slavery was abolished in 1834. Independence came in July 1973.

Junkanoo takes over the streets in the small hours of Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, with goatskin drums, cowbells and crepe-paper costumes that take months to build. Rake-and-scrape bands play a carpenter’s saw scraped with a knife. Conch is eaten raw in salad or battered and fried. Sidney Poitier, the first Black winner of the Oscar for Best Actor, grew up on Cat Island. The economy runs on tourism, offshore banking, the port of Freeport and the salt pans of Inagua.