Around Spanish Wells

Tags: Bahamas, Royal Island, sailing, Spanish Wells

Date: May 11, 2017

We continued Northwest and anchored in a protected bay off Royal Island, where we had a very nice sunset:

The next day we went ashore on the island, tying up our dinghy to a little stone dock:

The stone dock was part of a large project from the 1930's, where a rich man decided to start up a plantation and built a large luxurious stone house on Royal Island. It did not turn out that well and now the ruins of the house and its outhouses are slowly being taken over by vegetation:

The stones used to build the houses were sailed in small boats from a neighboring island:

This shows the fireplace in the bathroom. We think the fireplace was there not so much to heat up the room (should not be necessary in these parts of the world) but to heat water for the bathtub (behind the photographer). The pipes running back and forth at the bottom of the fireplace are connected to the cylindrical water tank to the left in the photo:

The different rooms of the ground floor of the house lead out the this arched corridor. The stairs on the left lead up to the top floor of the house:

After Royal Island we went to the neighboring island, where the town of Spanish Wells is located. It was the first real town we visited since Providenciales in Turks and Caicos (sorry George Town) and due to a successful lobster fishing fleet, the town is rather wealthy. We saw a lot of large well kept houses, many of them newly painted in bright colors:

Some of the houses even had lush ornamental gardens:

Long, almost deserted, beach behind the town: