Paradise Island
Paradise Island sits just across Nassau Harbour from New Providence, connected by two bridges — close enough to reach in minutes, distinct enough to feel like a different proposition entirely. The northern shore opens onto Cabbage Beach, two miles of pale sand that absorbs the Atlantic light differently at every hour. On the road beneath the bridges, Potter's Cay is where fishing boats unload conch straight from the sea, and vendors cut it into salad on the spot.
The island is small — you can drive its length in under ten minutes — but it layers a lot: a 14th-century French cloister transplanted to tropical gardens, a water park built on a resort-city scale, a marina designed by a Bahamian architect who understood that place-making is about light and proportion, not just pastels.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to start mornings at Cabbage Beach before the resort crowds arrive, then drift toward Potter's Cay for conch salad on the way back into Nassau. The Ocean Club's Versailles gardens are worth the walk even if you're not staying there — the Cloisters at the top are quieter than you'd expect.
How Paradise Island came to be
Hog Island, as it was known for most of its history, was a quiet scrub of land across the harbour from Nassau until 1959, when Huntington Hartford — heir to the A&P grocery fortune — arrived and saw something else. He bought the island from Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, renamed it Paradise Island in 1962, and set about building a resort in his own image: the Ocean Club, Cafe Martinique, a golf course with Gary Player as pro, and, most improbably, a 14th-century Augustinian cloister he'd acquired and reassembled stone by stone after William Randolph Hearst had first dismantled it from Montréjeau in the 1920s.
Hartford eventually sold to Resorts International, who built the first bridge from New Providence in 1966. The casino followed in 1968. South African hotelier Sol Kerzner bought the property in 1994, and on December 11, 1998, the Royal Towers opened as the centrepiece of what became Atlantis Paradise Island — a resort so large it has its own marine habitat and water park. Brookfield Asset Management took ownership in 2023.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
The most comfortable window runs from late November through May, when temperatures sit around 25–28°C and humidity eases slightly. Hurricane season officially spans June to November, with September carrying the highest risk and the year's heaviest rainfall.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.