An Eleuthera Slideshow

Eleuthera, a 100-mile long, one-to-two-mile-wide slither of coral whose northern tip lies sixty miles east of Nassau, is one of thirty inhabited Bahamian islands. Like most of the “Family Islands,” as the Bahamas government calls the scattered portions of its domain beyond Grand Bahama (Freeport) and New Providence (Nassau) islands, it’s poised between being a comfortable backwater and the Next Big Thing; and, in fact, one of its outlying islets, Harbour Island, is solidly established as an outpost of the very well heeled. The rest of Eleuthera, though, seems to be taking a fairly low-key path to development. There isn’t much of a resort infrastructure – no high-rises with casinos on the ground floor and pools with bars that you swim up to, no Cable Beach or Atlantis – and most of the foreign influx is in the form of part-time homeowners, whose villas, ranging from modest to luxe to how-many-Haitian-gardeners-can-you-get? line much of the shoreline (and given the dimensions of the island noted above, there’s a lot of shore to line).

Still, much of Eleuthera isn’t developed at all. In one sense, it has un-developed: a century ago, it was the pineapple capital of the Americas, with extensive plantations and ships sailing regularly for eastern U.S. cities with fresh cargos. The American devlopment of a pineapple industry on its own islands of Hawaii mostly put an end to that, and cultivation is so moribund now that Gregory Town has to hunt out supplies of the spiky fruit for its annual pineapple festival. My wife Kay and I were lucky – we happened into the small supermarket in Governor’s Harbour just when a local grower had set out a table full of his off-season crop. “I’ll show you which one to buy,” he said, pointing out the little tufts at the center of each sector. “When those turn pink, the pineapple is ripe.” He had that right: the fruit, oddly white instead of the familiar yellow, was as sweet as any we’d ever tasted.

The pineapple fields may be mostly gone, but old Eleuthera survives in its quiet, friendly little towns. Kay rented a sunny studio with a courtyard in one village, Gregory Town, which appears in many of these photos; afterwards, we took one of the foreigners’ villas for a week and settled in to snorkel, eat pineapples, and enjoy some of the loveliest sunsets anywhere.

All photos were taken with an Olympus E-410 digital SLR camera.

Sunset in Gregory Town, Eleuthera