The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park was established in 1958 as the first marine protected area of its kind anywhere on earth, decades before the phrase "no-take zone" entered common use.
Its boundaries enclose roughly 176 square miles of seabed, sandbank and low limestone island, administered from Warderick Wells by the Bahamas National Trust. There is no standard park entrance fee — 0 USD — because access arrives by hull rather than by gate, and costs sit inside the boat tour packages that carry visitors across.
The chain runs some 120 miles southeast of New Providence. A nassau to exuma day trip by boat therefore crosses one of the sharpest underwater boundaries in the Atlantic: the shallow Great Bahama Bank on one side, the Exuma Sound dropping past 6,000 feet on the other. That contrast produces the water colour the cays are known for. Pale aragonite sand reflects light upward through three or four feet of clear water; the sound absorbs it. Sailors have used the line between the two as a navigational aid since the eighteenth century, when Loyalist planters arrived and briefly attempted cotton on the thin soil.
The agriculture failed. Salt raking, sponging and sloop-building followed, and the cays emptied. Much of the archipelago is uninhabited still, which is precisely what preserved it. Staghorn and elkhorn coral, Nassau grouper nurseries, spiny lobster and green turtles all persist here in numbers now rare elsewhere in the region. Iguanas of the endemic genus Cyclura hold several cays outright.
The swimming pigs of the central Exumas are more recent and less easily dated. They were first widely photographed in the 1990s; the population is managed today, with feeding rules and shaded pens ashore. Their fame reshaped Bahamian tourism, pulling day traffic away from Nassau's cruise berths toward the out islands and their sandbars. Guided Exuma Cays boat tours from Nassau now form a substantial share of that traffic, and the operators running nassau to exuma day trip by boat tickets do so under Bahamas National Trust and Department of Marine Resources oversight.
Geologically the cays are young: oolitic limestone laid down and lithified over the last few hundred thousand years, ridged into low dunes and undercut at the waterline into the flared notches locals call bootlegs. Blue holes puncture the bank. Thunderball Grotto, a collapsed cave system off Staniel Cay, is the most photographed of them, its ceiling pierced by shafts of daylight. The park keeps its gates open daily, 08:00–17:00.
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