Bahamas

Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Freeport, Marsh Harbour — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Nassau grew from a British colonial settlement on New Providence Island in the late 17th century, a haven first for pirates — including Blackbeard and Charles Vane who used its harbour in the early 1700s — and later for Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, whose plantation architecture survives in the pink colonial buildings of Bay Street.

El idioma oficial es inglés, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, las Bahamas se contactan mediante el código +1242. Junkanoo — the Bahamian street festival celebrated on Boxing Day and New Year's Day — involves months of secret costume-building by competing groups, culminating in all-night parades of feathered and beaded constructions weighing over 50 kilograms worn by dancers moving to goatskin drums and cowbells, a tradition with roots in West African masquerade that survived enslavement in Caribbean form.

El tráfico rodado circula por la izquierda, en consonancia con la convención de

La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC-05:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.

The Bahamas has produced Olympic sprint champions entirely disproportionate to its 400,000 population — Frank Rutherford, Pauline Davis and the relay teams that won gold at Athens 2004 — and the islands' per-capita Olympic medal count in athletics rivals that of Jamaica, sustained by a culture in which school track meets are the country's primary sporting spectacle.

The Andros Barrier Reef, the third-largest coral reef system in the world, runs 225 kilometres along the eastern edge of Andros Island, dropping into the Tongue of the Ocean — a submarine trench plunging 1,800 metres that the US Navy has used as an underwater testing range, the deepest and most abrupt transition from reef to abyss in the Atlantic.