Nassau is the capital of the Bahamas, sitting on New Providence Island in the northwest of the archipelago. It's a city of real contrasts: colonial-era pastel buildings and cobbled streets in the old downtown, massive cruise ship terminals crowding the waterfront, and a string of resort hotels strung along Cable Beach to the west.
Most visitors come for the beaches, and they deliver. The water is genuinely turquoise, the sand is white, and the sea temperature is warm most of the year. Cabbage Beach on Paradise Island is the picture-postcard one; the giant Atlantis resort and its aquarium tunnels sit just behind it.
But Nassau has more going on than beach time. The old town is walkable, with the colonial pink-and-white core around Parliament Square, Fort Fincastle on its hill, the slave-cut Queen's Staircase, a proper Straw Market, and a handful of good museums — the Pirates of Nassau and the sober Pompey Museum of Slavery chief among them.
The food capital is Arawak Cay — a strip of open-air seafood shacks where Nassau itself eats and where the conch salad is prepared in front of you. The Junkanoo festival in December and January is one of the Caribbean's great street spectacles — loud, colorful, and entirely the Bahamian thing.