Compleat Angler Site

Site of Hemingway's favourite Bimini hotel, lost to fire in 2006

For seventy years the Compleat Angler on the King's Highway in Alice Town was the heart of Bimini's tourist mythology. Ernest Hemingway spent long stretches here between 1935 and 1937, fishing for marlin in the daytime and drinking heavily in the bar at night. The walls were thick with his photographs, fishing logs, and signed letters until a 2006 fire destroyed the building and almost all of its contents.

The site has not yet been rebuilt and now reads as a vacant lot, but it remains a stop on any walking tour of Alice Town — guides at the nearby Bimini Big Game Club will point it out. The remaining Hemingway presence on the island is mostly nostalgic: a few photographs in other bars, a path he is said to have walked, and the marlin themselves, still here.

things to do sight
A story
The original Compleat Angler Hotel, where Hemingway brawled with locals, drank Bacardi cocktails on the porch and worked on To Have and Have Not, burned to the ground in January 2006. The fire took with it the original Hemingway memorabilia — letters, photographs, the marlin-fishing logbook — that had been displayed there for half a century.