Bahamas Travel Destinations
Taking advantage of closeness to North America, a hot, sunny, though humid climate, white sand beaches and waters kept warm by the Gulf Stream, the Bahamians and businessmen from outside the country have developed tourism on a vast scale. Now, over 2 million tourists, most of them from North America, visit the Bahamas each year and the tourist industry is the mainstay of the country's economy, employing two-thirds of the workforce.
One of the most remarkable projects of these years has been the fref.port city / Lucaya development near the western end of Grand Bahama . Until the 1950s, this was a barren, unpromising area mostly covered with pine forest. But then an American financier named Wallace Groves came to an agreement with the government to develop the area for both tourism and industry. Freeport City/ Lucaya today is the largest single resort complex in the West Indies, with luxury hotels, casinos, villas, fine beaches and even a fanciful International Bazaar, which comprises 4 hectares (10 acres) of shops and restaurants reproducing settings from all over the world - an English pub, a Parisian cafe and a setting from Thailand, for example. There is also a deep-water harbour with a number of industrial enterprises set round it, including a cement works, a pharmaceutical plant, a major oil refinery and oil transshipment terminals,
On enagua, the southernmost inhabited islands, there is one of the world's largest complexes for producing salt by solar evaporation. A plant on New Providence processes frozen lobster tails for export to the USA , and the government is encouraging agriculture on a number of islands, especially Andros . to make the country more self-sufficient in food. At the same time, Bahamian laws, which exempt individuals and corporations from income and inheritance taxes, have attracted more than 360 banks and trust companies to the country. Nassau is a Eurodollar trading centre that compares with London .
The main centers in the Bahamas are New Providence and Grand Bahama, which have been developed for tourism and business, but life on many of the other islands, known as the Family or Out Islands , has been little affected by the changes of recent years.
Off ELEUTHERA for example, to the east of New Providence, is the little island of Spanish Wells . Its white inhabitants are the descendants of the first Puritan settlers and have managed to retain their separate identity for nearly 300 years. Craftsmen on the Abaco group of islands, between Eleuthcra and Grand Bahama, are still building boats as their ancestors have done for generations; and George Town , in the exuma group and almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, still keeps the character of a tiny island capital.
Other islands include Long Cay, with a population in 1980 of 33 people, and the tiny Bimini group which lie closest to Florida . Here the American writer Ernest Hemingway lived for a while and the black actor Sidney Poitier spent much of his childhood, cat island, on the eastern edge of the Bahamas, has their highest point, Mount Alvcrnia -only 63 m (207 ft) above sea level - and Andros, west of New Providence, has a number of blue holes. Blue holes - found throughout the Bahamas but particularly common on Andros - are large, steep-sided inland tunnels where the ocean rises through the coral foundations of the island. Even more impressive, though, is the Andros Barrier Reef off the island's eastern coast. It is 200 km (about 125 miles) long and is second only in size to Australia 's Great Barrier Reef .