No slowdown in the spending of the wealthy island of the Bahamas

The news that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had been spotted on the marina of this tiny (5 square mile) speck of island for a vacation was greeted with amazement by the tourists who had gathered to watch the magnificent sunset at the bar, and with dismay by the locals, worried that their little corner of paradise was turning into the next Saint Barts.

“I heard it’s just down the street,” a woman sitting alone at the bar told us. She was happily quaffing perfectly cold prosecco in a champagne flute.

The locals seemed unimpressed.

“It’s the two percent who are coming, and the ultra-rich,” one shopkeeper told us, noting that business had been brisk among the wealthier Americans, Canadians and Britons who are the backbone of the economy here.

Maybe too lively.

“We have 20 billionaires on this island alone. The traffic is becoming unbearable,” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

I straightened up and tried to look like a two percenter, but I wasn’t sure what they looked like.

Traffic? What traffic? I looked out the window of his shop. Most people drove around in golf carts. With a population of just 1,800, Harbor Island and its only town, Dunmore Town, make Saint Barts (pop. 11,000) look like downtown Manhattan.

The woman herself, she explained, had moved to Eleuthera, a 10-minute water taxi ride away, where hoi polloi apparently rarely come.

All of which begs the question: Why would anyone, let alone Taylor Swift and a bunch of billionaires, get to this tiny speck?

Why are there so many huge yachts in Valentines Marina?

Harbor Island is barely an island. It’s an island off the coast of another island, in this case Eleuthera, about 60 miles northeast of Nassau. You cannot arrive by plane. You need to fly to Eleuthera, take a taxi to a dock a few miles away, and take a water taxi to Harbor Island.

This inaccessibility, it seems, is a major selling point for the small group of people who can adapt to the island and afford to pay the high (Saint Barts-style) prices.

The key word is “small”. The larger hotel has 41 rooms; the dozen other hotels have fewer. Overall there cannot be more than 250 hotel rooms on the entire island. It’s unlikely you’ll see a major global chain set up shop here. I doubt the infrastructure can support a large hotel. It is therefore not surprising that the few houses on the island are rented out briskly.

Walk around the city for a few days, though, and you’ll understand why a small group of travelers keep coming back and seem very disinterested in making it bigger:

• Pink Sand Beach: This is one of the largest beaches in the Caribbean, indeed in the world. It’s really pink, thanks to the decaying shells of microscopic sea creatures. It remains white, hundreds of feet from shore, no seaweed, no rocks, nothing, just blue water. It’s flat and the sand is firm, so you can walk without sinking. It is so compact that people ride horses up and down the entire three-mile stretch.
• The restaurants: How is it possible that an island with a few hundred visitors can support so many great restaurants? There are local places like Queen Conch or Ma Ruby, which serves great Caribbean food and is known for its “Cheeseburger in Paradise” (it’s served on a brioche-style bun and supposedly earned the praise of Jimmy Buffett). There’s great Italian food at Aquapazza, and classic Caribbean meat and fish dishes at Latitude 25 at the Coral Sands Hotel, or the elegant Dunmore Hotel, or Malcolm 51 at the elegant all-cottage Pink Sands Resort, or at the Rock House, or The Landing, or on Valentine’s Day. And still can’t get reservation for many nights.
• Homes: You’d think that an island with so many visitors and wealthy residents would be filled with gigantic McMansions and multi-acre compounds. They are certainly here. The captain of the boat we hired for a day cruise joked that “millionaires live on the north side, billionaires live on the south side, and everyone else lives in the middle.” People like Bill Gates, Ron Perlman, Mickey Drexler, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg and Wayne Huizenga are said to have homes here. But Dunmore Town is full of modest, one- and two-storey houses, ablaze with colour: blues, yellows, reds, a veritable explosion of pastels, along with purple convolvulus everywhere.
• The churches: Walk on a Sunday and you can hear singing. It is a religious country: 90% belong to some religious denomination, although it is largely Protestant (Baptists and Anglicans), with Roman Catholics and a smattering of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Greek Orthodox and others. We attended the Lighthouse Church of God to hear Pastor Samuel Higgs, guitarist Rocky Sanders, and a heavenly group of singers playing old school gospel music. Mick Jagger and Lenny Kravitz also stopped by. Higgs and Sanders played European clubs before returning to the island.
• People: The people of the Bahamas are famous for their warmth and friendliness, and this shows in abundance on a small island like this. Just say “good morning” to anyone and they will stop and say, “Good morning! How are you?” They will smile and mean it.

Even though locals complain about traffic and rich people, don’t expect the Bahamian government to close the door. Tourism accounts for 50% of the country’s GDP and employs almost 70% of the workforce. Thanks to this infusion of money, per capita income is the third largest in the Western Hemisphere (behind the United States and Canada).

Luxury travel may be booming, but Caribbean travel in general remains strong. Last year, arrivals increased by 14.3%, according to a recent report from the Caribbean Tourism Organization reported by the Caribbean Journal.

And while the locals may complain, any small island or town would kill to get the kind of intense loyalty that places like this seem to generate.

The woman at the bar at Valentines said she had been coming here for 20 years and had spent her honeymoon here. She had flown to Eleuthera on a private plane with her husband (who owned car dealerships in the Midwest), her children, and their friends. They had chartered a boat to spend a few weeks in the Bahamas and were going south to even smaller islands.

Why was she sitting alone at the bar?

Her family, she said with a smile, was looking for Taylor Swift.