Hope Town

The Elbow Reef Lighthouse is the first thing you see arriving in Hope Town by boat, a red-and-white candy cane rising above the curve of the harbour, and it is also, as far as anyone can verify, one of the last hand-wound kerosene lighthouses still operating anywhere on earth. Every evening at sunset the keeper climbs the hundred-odd steps, lights the mantle, and winds the clockwork mechanism that turns the lens — no electricity, no automation, just the same mechanical choreography that’s been repeated since 1863. I climbed it myself at midday when the lamp was dark, and the view from the gallery is the best free orientation to the Abacos you’ll get: the harbour curled below in a near-perfect hook, Elbow Cay’s slim spine of pastel roofs, and the barrier reef beyond, breaking the Atlantic swell into a visible white line.

The town itself is a settlement of Loyalists who arrived from the American colonies after the Revolutionary War, and it still carries that inheritance in its architecture — saltbox cottages painted in yellows, pinks, and blues, picket fences, and narrow lanes too tight for cars, so golf carts are the only traffic that exists. I rented one for two days and never wanted an engine again; there’s a particular pleasure in puttering at twelve miles an hour past a bakery, a church, and a harbour full of sailboats, with nothing mechanical drowning out the wind. Hurricane Dorian struck Abaco directly in 2019 and Hope Town took real damage, but the rebuilding has been careful and visible, cottage by cottage, and the lighthouse itself, remarkably, never stopped operating.

Beyond the town, Elbow Cay’s ocean side has a string of quiet beaches reached by short sandy paths through sea grape and casuarina, each one different in character — Tahiti Beach at the southern tip curls around a sandbar that all but disappears at high tide, while the beaches nearer town are calmer and better for an evening swim after the lighthouse has been lit above you.

When to go: November through May for the driest, most comfortable weather and the least hurricane risk. Book ferry transfers from Marsh Harbour in advance during the winter holidays, when the harbour fills up fast.