Woodstar sits inside the Moriah Harbour Cay National Park — 23,000 acres of sand dunes, coral reefs, mangrove creeks, seagrass and forest, home to corals, sea turtles, conch, lobster, and sharks. The line of the Tropic of Cancer runs straight through the bay in front of the house. A few things to know before you arrive.
The Tropic of Cancer is drawn directly through the sand, marked by a wooden sign nobody minds. The beach is bay-protected, soft, mostly empty, and the only beach for two miles in either direction.
"If you go out to the beach at the Woodstar Beach House and look over the water, you can see where the boundary of the park is," says Catherine Booker, the Exuma programme coordinator for the Bahamas National Trust. The park extends underwater and is much bigger than just the islands — 23,000 acres of dunes, reefs, mangroves, seagrass and forest, home to sea turtles, conch, lobster, and sharks. It is the only community-initiated park in the Bahamas' national system, founded in 1998 after local activists prevented commercial development.
The Queen Conch is a large marine snail and a long-standing staple of the Bahamian diet. But the animal is particularly sensitive to overfishing, and the park is part of a wider data-gathering mission to monitor stocks and breed new populations. "Conch is integral to the Bahamian cultural identity," says Bahamas National Trust director Eric Carey, "which makes the depletion all the more devastating." You can still find conch salad on every menu — just know what you're eating.
Those deep blue patches under the water around Woodstar are called blue holes — the contrast between the dark water in their depths and the lighter water around them. Leftover from past ice ages, when sea levels were much lower and the exposed limestone eroded into networks of caves. The greatest concentration is at Andros to the west, where 22 blue holes are protected as a national park and the rare Bahama Oriole still nests.
A short drive up the Queen's Highway. The 19th-century salt-loader still stands, the salt ponds reflect a flamingo pink at the right time of year. Stop at Santanna's Bar & Grill in Williams Town for the famous sauces, or Tropic Breeze for uncomplicated hilltop dining. Cash is preferred everywhere.
The name is the game. Reachable by boat from George Town. The conch salad and the Sunday pig roast are tops. Tame stingrays loiter in the water right off the bar — swim with them, pet them, an aquatic encounter of the third kind. The Exumas' most famous beach bar, and rightfully so.
You hear bright, cheerful goombay music everywhere on the streets and beaches of the Bahamas — not quite rhythm, not quite blues. A hybrid of Trinidadian calypso and Jamaican mento, but the sound is purely Bahamian. The goombay is actually a drum with a goatskin membrane; in rake and scrape, a steel carpenter's saw is stroked with a metal file. "Rake and scrape is a fusion of European and African culture," says band leader Ophie Webb. "The accordion is the influence of Europe; the goatskin drum is the African part." Worth catching a live set if you can — the music symbolises both the suffering and the celebration of the islands.
Tell us what sounds good. Our team has lived here long enough to know what's worth your time — and the days that look better on Instagram than they feel in person.
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