Mayaguana

Mayaguana is the southeasternmost inhabited island in the Bahamas, closer in raw distance to Cuba and the Turks and Caicos than to Nassau, and it holds the distinction, by most informal counts, of being the least-visited island in the entire archipelago that still has an airport and a functioning settlement. I flew in on a small propeller plane that was maybe a third full, and the immigration officer at the tiny airport processed my passport with the unhurried curiosity of someone who genuinely doesn’t see many of these. Abraham’s Bay, the main settlement, sits along one of the largest natural harbours in the Bahamas, a wide, reef-protected bight that could in theory anchor a serious marina industry and instead anchors a handful of fishing skiffs and a quiet fixed sense that nothing here is in a hurry to change.

Out past the settlement, the ruins of a Cold War-era US missile tracking station sit slowly dissolving into scrub near Abraham’s Bay, concrete foundations and rusted antenna mounts from a brief period in the 1950s and 60s when Mayaguana had a strategic significance utterly disproportionate to its population, part of a chain of tracking stations supporting early space and missile programs from Cape Canaveral. Walking among the concrete slabs with goats grazing unbothered between them, it was hard to reconcile the island’s total present-day quiet with the fact that satellites were once tracked from this exact patch of scrub.

The beaches, predictably, are essentially empty in every direction — Pirate’s Well and Betsy Bay both have long stretches of pale sand I had entirely to myself, and the water clarity is the kind that makes snorkeling directly off the beach worthwhile without a boat at all. There’s very little in the way of formal tourism infrastructure, which is precisely the point for anyone who makes the trip.

When to go: December through April for the calmest weather. Flights are infrequent and accommodation is minimal — confirm everything in advance, and expect to be self-sufficient once you arrive.