The Water and Sewerage Corporation states that its reverse osmosis plant provides 90 per cent of the water used in New Providence, and that it no longer barges water into the capital.

That barging is worth knowing about, because it lasted about 35 years. After strict rationing from the mid 1970s, when New Providence could not meet demand from groundwater, water was shipped from Andros to Nassau until expansion of the Blue Hills facility ended it. Andros is the island best endowed with fresh water, though parts of South Andros have very high salt content, and groundwater declines as you go south through the archipelago.

The constraint here is geological rather than a formal water stress ranking: thin freshwater lenses sitting on porous limestone, easily over drawn and easily contaminated.

The Bahamas imports nearly 90 per cent of its food, at a cost of around US$1 billion a year.

The reason is geological. Agricultural land is 1.3 per cent of the land area and agriculture is 0.51 per cent of GDP, both by far the lowest in the region. The Bahamas is limestone, and there is very little soil.

Government policy aims to lift agriculture from 1.5 per cent of GDP to 10 per cent by 2031, and requires foreign investors to source 40 per cent of food from local farmers and fishers.

One useful lesson in reading statistics: food is only 19.96 per cent of Bahamian merchandise imports, the lowest of the islands we compare, while the share of food consumed that is imported is the highest. The two numbers measure different things and are not interchangeable.

daily. The BAIC Farmers Market on Gladstone Road, run by the agricultural corporation, sells Bahamian produce every Saturday from around 8am to 3pm, much of it brought in from the Family Islands. The downtown Straw Market is craft, not produce, and we do not count it.

There is a real Ital presence, with plant based spots such as RASTA Green n Tings in Nassau. The caveat is scale: the Bahamas imports close to 90 per cent of its food and only about 1.5 per cent of the land is suitable for agriculture, so local produce is a genuine but small share of what is eaten.

imestone.

The one genuine exception we found is The Farm on North Eleuthera, a very small cottage hotel built around a working organic farm with over 200 garden beds and a freshwater well, supplying its own kitchen and the owner's other hotels. Government policy aims to lift agriculture from 1.5 per cent of GDP to 10 per cent by 2031 and requires foreign investors to source 40 per cent of food from local farmers and fishers.

Until that lands, nearly 90 per cent of food arrives by ship and almost none of it is certified organic.

34.6 per cent of land was protected in 2024, nearly double Jamaica's, and 7.7 per cent of territorial waters, the only island here above one per cent. There are more than 30 national parks and reserves across 16 islands, managed by the Bahamas National Trust.

The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park was established in 1958 across 112,640 acres of land and sea. In the Trust's own words, as the first land and sea park in the world it contributed significantly to the development of marine protected areas globally. No fishing, shelling or conching of any kind is permitted. In other words, the Bahamas effectively invented the marine protected area as a category, which is a far better headline than any beach.

Inagua National Park, established 1965 across 287 square miles, holds the largest breeding colony of West Indian flamingos in the world at roughly 70,000 birds, after a forty year journey back from the edge of extinction. The Trust itself was created in 1959 out of the Society for the Protection of the Flamingo, and hired local hunters as its first wardens. Blue Holes National Park on Andros, established 2002 across 40,000 acres, protects 22 inland blue holes.

The Bahamas National Trust has put it at fewer than 300 left in the world, and early estimates of 141 to 254 individuals drove the IUCN listing, though later distance sampling in northern North Andros estimated substantially more within the study area. Its threats are unusually specific: lethal yellowing killing the introduced coconut palms it prefers for breeding, the arrival of the brood parasitic shiny cowbird, and clearance of native coppice.

Other endemics include the Bahama woodstar, the Inagua woodstar, the Bahama nuthatch and the Bahama swallow. Brace's emerald, a hummingbird, is extinct.

One correction worth carrying, because it is repeated everywhere: the American flamingo is the national bird but it is not endemic to the Bahamas. What is true, and better, is that Inagua holds the world's largest breeding colony.

Nassau joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a City of Crafts and Folk Art in 2014, on the strength of Junkanoo and straw work.

The word is plait, pronounced plat. Young unopened fronds of silver top palm are cut, dried, cured, split and plaited into lengths, with pond top palmetto favoured in southern Andros and sisal growing wild. Around sixty named patterns once existed, Jacob's Ladder, Bahama Mama, Cow Teeth, Peas 'n' Rice, Shark Tooth among them. It made fanners for winnowing grain, fish pots, floor mats, thatch roofs and hats. In Red Bays on Andros the coiled style traces to Black Seminoles who settled there from 1817, and a visiting Seminole Tribe of Florida chairman recorded that no man made materials go into it at all, palm leaves and buds only.

The swap here is not our idea, it is the government's. Ahead of the national plastics ban, the Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation urged straw artisans to make straw tote bags as replacements and sold them at its Farmers Markets so shoppers could prepare. Artisans reported the orders coming in. So a hand plaited straw tote, used as your shopping and beach bag, is the exact substitution the state's own industrial agency promoted.

Buy from the maker: Princess Styles at Old Bight on Cat Island, over thirty years at it; Best Quality Baskets at Red Bays on Andros; the Starfish Traders collective of craftswomen at Seymours on Long Island; The Plait Lady at Marina Village, where Clare Sands buys plait directly from Family Island weavers; the Bahama Crafts Centre on Paradise Island, open daily nine to six, where you can watch the work.

On the Nassau Straw Market, we will tell you what is actually known rather than repeat a statistic. Vendors sell genuine handmade work alongside imported t shirts and keychains to make the stall pay. Scholars have recorded vendors decorating foreign goods with raffia to Bahamianise them. And in July 2024 the Nassau Cruise Port offered to promote authentically Bahamian makers free of charge, but the project stalled because the Straw Market Authority did not produce a list of qualifying artisans. There is no published audit of the split, and we are not going to invent one. If it matters to you, buy on the Out Islands or from the named shops above.

The decline is material as well as cultural. Silver top palm is disappearing under development and hurricanes, so plaiters travel further to find it and the finished bag costs more, which tourists read as overcharging. Many of the sixty patterns went with the elders who knew them.

duled single use plastic food ware including polystyrene cups and plates, plastic cutlery and straws. Businesses had until 30 June 2020 to clear stock, and only by charging between 25 cents and one dollar for it.

Two features make this the most interesting plastics law in the region. It bans biodegradable and oxo biodegradable bags as well as conventional ones, closing the greenwash loophole most bans leave wide open. And it bans balloon releases outright.

Waste handling and recycling rates could not be verified.

Waste on New Providence goes to the Harold Road site, the former landfill, which suffered repeated large fires for years and was classed by PAHO as a partially controlled hazardous dumpsite. A private operator, Renew Bahamas, ran a materials recovery facility there from around 2014 before exiting.

The site is now being redeveloped as the New Providence Ecology Park, which plans a new Material Recovery Facility for cans, glass, plastic, aluminium, cardboard and paper, reported breaking ground in 2024. There is no verified national household recycling collection, no reliable published national rate, and very limited infrastructure on the Out Islands. Some private and site based recycling exists and a new facility is being built, but for most residents recycling is not yet a routine service.

UNESCO describes it as the national cultural festival, dating to the beginning of the nineteenth century, brought to the Bahamas by enslaved Africans who used their three day holiday to recreate festivals from home.

The detail that matters for us is that UNESCO's own citation identifies the transmission mechanism: costumes are crafted in community workshops called shacks, where knowledge passes across generations. That is what separates Junkanoo from a staged parade. The parades run on Boxing Day and New Year's Day along Bay Street in downtown Nassau, roughly from one in the morning until nine.

On indigenous heritage, be accurate. Excavations at Preacher's Cave in North Eleuthera recovered Lucayan Taino remains dated to AD 800 to 1300, alongside seventeenth century English settlers and, later, a free black community. But the Lucayans were eradicated within decades of European contact. There is no continuing Lucayan community in the Bahamas. Preacher's Cave is an archaeological heritage site, not a living indigenous community, and should be visited as one.