Exuma is the one place on Earth where a colony of feral pigs swims out to greet approaching boats, and nobody knows for certain how they got there. On Big Major Cay, an uninhabited island near Staniel Cay, around twenty pigs live along the shore; when a boat nears, they wade in and paddle out to meet it in search of food. Local stories credit farmers who moved a smelly pigpen off Staniel Cay, or sailors who left the animals meaning to return. The truth was lost long ago, and the pigs have become an emblem of the Bahamas. They belong to a district of more than 365 cays strung out over 200 kilometres, over shallow banks that turn the water an electric turquoise. Further north, the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park still shelters the endangered Bahamian rock iguana, and in 1958 it was doing something no park anywhere else had tried.
The magic here is scale and colour: white sand underfoot and pastel shallows so clear they erase any sense of depth, blurring the line between sea and sky. The best moment comes early, when you reach Pig Beach across a calm morning sea and the pigs splash out toward the boat. Elsewhere you can wade waist-deep across a sandbank far from any land, or drop through the roof of Thunderball Grotto into a sunlit chamber loud with reef fish. Feeding the pigs is now limited. After several died in 2017, blamed on junk food and swallowed sand, caretakers from Staniel Cay began supplying fresh water and shade. Visitors are now asked to offer only fruit and vegetables, handed over in the water rather than on the beach.