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Bahamas
An archipelago of cays and shallow turquoise seas
The Bahamas scatters some seven hundred islands and over two thousand cays across the clear, shallow seas southeast of Florida. Only a few dozen are inhabited, yet they hold around 400,000 people and one of the highest incomes in the Caribbean, built on tourism and offshore finance. Famed for powder-soft beaches, the world's third-largest barrier reef, and blue holes plunging into the limestone, the Bahamas is more an ocean realm than a land one, its character shaped by the sea on every side.
The islands are low and flat, formed of coral limestone, with the highest point a mere 63 meters at Mount Alvernia on Cat Island. The Great Bahama Bank and Little Bahama Bank create the famous luminous turquoise shallows, while deep blue holes and ocean trenches lie between islands. The climate is subtropical, pleasant in winter but exposed to severe hurricanes, as Dorian showed catastrophically in 2019.
A landfall in Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage, the Bahamas later became a British colony and a haven for pirates and, during prohibition, rum-runners. Independent since 1973, it thrives on tourism centered on Nassau and Paradise Island and on a major offshore banking sector. Cruise traffic, financial services, and resilience to ever-stronger storms shape its modern economy.