Escape to The Bahamas
With beautiful beaches, warm, friendly people and a location starting 50 miles off the Florida coast, a vacation in the Bahamas is the perfect place to take a break from dreary winter weather.
The Bahamas is an archipelago with more than 700 islands spread out over 100,000 square miles of ocean. While two of the northernmost islands suffered damage in Hurricane Dorian, most of the country was unaffected, including 14 of the most commonly visited islands. The Bahamas’ economy depends on tourism and the best thing consumers can do to help recovery efforts is to visit and take advantage of all that the country has to offer.
Nassau, the capital, and adjacent Paradise Island offer a range of resorts, lots of places to get flavorful Caribbean cuisine and activities such as diving, snorkeling and swimming with the dolphins. You’ll find numerous beaches, each with its own character, like popular Cable Beach, near restaurants and shops. The Straw Market and Festival Place are perfect spots to look for local crafts.
To soak up some history, you can stroll around Parliament Square, with its Colonial-influenced pink buildings. Afterward, climb up the 65-step Queen’s Staircase that leads to Fort Fincastle, built in the 18th century to protect Nassau’s harbor from pirates.
For a quaint, boutique getaway, consider a trip to Eleuthera and Harbour Island, linked by a five-minute ferry ride across sky-blue water. Harbour Island is a small, picturesque seaside town where you can spend an afternoon admiring the New England-style architecture or sunbathing on the Pink Sand Beach. Long and thin Eleuthera is a place where you can get close to nature. You can spend a day exploring the island’s blue holes that lead to underwater caves. On the northern end of the island, be sure to visit the Glass Window Bridge, where a sliver of land separates the dark blue of the Atlantic Ocean from Eleuthera’s smooth turquoise waters.
Andros is the largest island in The Bahamas and a paradise for eco-travelers. It’s covered with vast acres of wetlands, and the island’s miles of deserted beaches and freshwater lakes attract countless species of plants and animals. It’s also home to the world’s third-largest fringing barrier reef and the Tongue of the Ocean, a mile-deep abyss teeming with marine life. If you’re an active traveler, there are plenty of opportunities outdoors to have fun, from kayaking, bird watching and hiking to snorkeling, diving and fishing.
History buffs will find lots to explore on the southern island of San Salvador, home to monuments, ruins and shipwrecks that reflect its history, including memorials that commemorate the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The island is formed from the exposed peak of a submerged mountain that rises 15,000 feet from the ocean floor. It has one of the most unique landscapes in The Bahamas, with undulating hills, beautiful beaches, numerous saltwater lakes and reefs.
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