Dolphin House Museum

Folk-art house museum covered in mosaic and shell work

The Dolphin House on Alice Town's King's Highway is a working folk-art project: a two-storey house entirely encrusted with mosaic dolphins, shell patterns, and beach finds, built single-handed by the local historian Ashley Saunders over more than three decades.

Saunders runs short tours through the rooms, explaining the symbolism of the dolphins (a recurring theme in Bimini folklore) and showing the rooftop view over the harbour. He has also written a two-volume history of Bimini that he sells from the doorstep. It is the strangest, most personal building on the island and well worth an hour.

things to do museum
A story
Ashley Saunders, a Bimini schoolteacher and historian, started building the Dolphin House by hand in 1993 with shells, beach glass, broken tile, and rubbish washed up on the Bimini shore. More than thirty years on it remains unfinished, and he gives the tours himself.