Spanish Wells

Spanish Wells occupies St. George’s Cay, a small island off the northern tip of Eleuthera reached by a short water taxi ride, and it is unlike anywhere else I visited in the Bahamas in a way I found hard to place until someone explained it plainly: the town was settled by Eleutheran Adventurers and Loyalist refugees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its population today, still largely descended from those same original families, is famously insular, close-knit, and — because of a hugely successful crawfish (spiny lobster) fishing industry that supplies a significant share of the entire Bahamian lobster export — noticeably wealthy for a town its size. The streets are lined with neat, well-kept houses, manicured yards, and driveways with more than one boat, which is unusual anywhere in the islands and immediately visible here.

Golf carts outnumber cars on the narrow streets, and the harbour is dense with commercial lobster boats rigged for the long expeditions many of them make each season to the fishing grounds off Cuba and Central America, sometimes staying out for weeks at a stretch. I talked with a boat captain on the dock who’d been fishing these same waters, on and off, for over thirty years, and who described the industry with the specific pride of someone whose family had built something durable rather than merely profitable — several generations of the same names on the same boats.

The town itself has almost none of the loose, improvised character of most small Out Island settlements, and that orderliness is its own kind of interesting — everything painted, everything mowed, everything apparently agreed upon by consensus. A short boat ride away, the uninhabited cays around Royal Island offer a wilder contrast, with quiet coves and a ruined, overgrown estate on Royal Island itself that feels like the exact opposite of the tidy town it faces.

When to go: Year-round, though winter and spring bring the calmest crossing from Eleuthera. Spanish Wells has limited tourist accommodation, since it isn’t really built for visitors — book ahead and expect a quieter, more residential atmosphere than elsewhere in the Bahamas.