Bahamas serves as the perfect weekend stress buster for the jet setting American crowd due to its distance of just 50 miles off the east coast of Florida. The calm waters and cooling trade winds of the Caribbean have moulded the country ambience aptly to project it as the international joint for sailing, regattas and diving all year round. Officially, the county is known as the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and is an archipelago of about 700 islands and 2,400 uninhabited islets and cays. This island nation of West Indies is encompassed by the Atlantic Ocean on all sides. It has Cuba and the Caribbean on the south, British dependency of the Turks and Caicos Islands to the east and Florida on the west as its offshore neighbours. Out of the hundred islands and cays of Bahamas only about 30 of them are inhabited. The most important is the New Providence on which the capital city of Nassau is situated. The second largest city in the country, Freeport, is located in the island of Grand Bahama. Among the other notable islands of Great Abaco, Bimini, Eleuthera Island, Cat Island, Bahamas and San Salvador Island, the largest one of all is the Andros Island. The topography of the country has no uniformity due to so many divisions of land area and is basically, rugged and barren. They are generally low and flat, riverless with many mangrove swamps. Coral reefs and shoals are a regular feature around most of the islands. The climatic conditions range from summer and winter and the region lies in the path of oceanic storms and hurricanes.

Bahamas tipical houses

Bahamas is yet another discovery out of the hundreds that Christopher Columbus made in fifteenth century on his voyage to the New World. Bahamian Lucayans inhabited the islands before the Spanish people anchored on the San Salvador islands of the Bahamas. But the mainland took a near barren shape after most of the population was taken as slave in neighbouring countries. Human existence flourished with the arrival of the British in the seventeenth century. During this time the islands emerged as a favourite joint for the pirates and were frequently attacked. The Bahamas became a Crown colony from 1717 until they were granted internal self-government in 1964. The islands moved toward greater autonomy in 1968 with general elections held in the country. On July 10, 1973, the Bahamas became an independent nation and a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Boats

Initially, the economy of Bahamas was dependent on agriculture and fishing. However, after independence, it diversified its development policies into tourism, financial services, and international shipping. A uniform growth in each sector, specially in tourism, granted Bahamas a healthy GDP rating and elevated the nation with the third highest per capita income in the western hemisphere.
A Governor General, who represents the British monarch in the countries, oversees the political organ of Bahamas. But the role is more or less ceremonial, and despite the monarch being regarded the head of state, the country is led by the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. The system is governed under the constitution of 1973 and supported by a bicameral legislature consisting of a 16-seat Senate and a 49-seat House of Assembly. All the public representatives are elected through nationwide votes in five years interval.

Lighthouse at Nassau