The Bahamas Are Being Eaten Alive by Failed Real Estate
In the Exumas, one of the most pristine island chains on earth, developers bulldoze roads into paradise and walk away when the money runs out.
There is a moment, if you're lucky enough to be on a boat working slowly up the Exumas chain in the Bahamas, when you realize you are looking at something that shouldn't exist anymore. The water is a blue so clear and so layered with aquamarine and turquoise that it looks digitally altered. The islands are low and scrubby and wild, punctuated by white sand beaches that nobody is on. The Exuma Land and Sea Park stretches across roughly 176 square miles of this corridor, and within it, nothing can be taken, built, or disturbed. For that stretch, at least, the Exumas are exactly what they always were.
And then you see the roads.
Not roads leading anywhere. Roads scraped into the limestone and brush of islands that, apart from those roads, look entirely uninhabited. Cleared lots on cays where no buildings followed. Rusting bulldozer equipment sitting at the edge of a pristine beach, slowly being reclaimed by saltwater air. These are the calling cards of a recurring phenomenon in the Exumas: the developer who comes in, acquires the land or the concession, makes enormous promises to the Bahamian government, plows a grid of roads into the island, and then runs out of money, patience, or both, leaving the scarred land behind and sailing off with few meaningful consequences. The dynamic will be familiar to anyone who followed what Jeffrey Epstein built on Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands. Outside money, a remote island, outsized ambitions, no accountability when it goes wrong. The Exumas version just happens without the criminal charges, and without anyone paying much attention at all.
This is arguably the most pressing environmental planning problem in one of the most ecologically spectacular places on earth. And it's been happening for decades.
The Pattern Is Almost Comedic, Except That It Isn't
The Exumas chain is roughly 130 miles long, comprising more than 360 islands stretching from Nassau southeast into the Atlantic. The permanent population of the entire chain is around 7,300 people, almost none of whom live outside the two main settlements of George Town on Great Exuma and Black Point on Great Guana Cay. The place is staggeringly thinly populated relative to its land area and its coastline. That sparseness is its entire appeal to tourists: this is what the Caribbean looked like before it was developed.
It is also the quality that makes the Exumas a recurring target for developers with oversized ambitions.
The pitch is almost always the same. A developer acquires a concession on a Crown Land cay, or assembles a private parcel, and comes to Nassau with a glossy architectural rendering and a promise: a world-class resort, hundreds of jobs, a transformative new destination. The Bahamian government, which derives roughly 60 percent of its GDP from tourism, is structurally inclined to say yes. The heads of agreement get signed. The equipment gets shipped to the island. The roads get cut.
And then, with remarkable frequency, something goes wrong. The financing falls through. The operating model proves unworkable for such a remote location. The developer underestimated the cost of construction in a place where every piece of rebar and every bag of cement has to arrive by boat. The jobs don't materialize at anything close to the promised scale. And the land that was scraped bare sits there, slowly eroding into the sea.
A 2005 study by Andrews University, looking at this exact phenomenon, put it plainly: conventional resort developments in the Bahamas rely on a cheap labor force, high visitor numbers, and intense access to amenities. When systems fail over time, projects become difficult to maintain because the Bahamas does not provide a sophisticated maintenance industry to sustain them at scale. The study found that projects can become "an obsolete and unmanageable relic." That phrase describes a surprising amount of the visual landscape of the Exumas chain.
Case Study: The Great Guana Cay Resort
The most concrete example I know firsthand is the abandoned development at Plain Bay, on Great Guana Cay, the island that is also home to Black Point settlement.
For nearly a decade, a company called Plain Bay Enterprises worked toward a resort that would have included 290 guest rooms, a spa, a golf course, and tennis courts, to be built in two phases on the Exuma Sound side of the island. At full buildout, this would have been, relative to Black Point's population of somewhere between 80 and 300 people, roughly the equivalent of dropping a 12-million-room resort adjacent to metropolitan Boston.
Around 2005, the development went bankrupt. And what it left on the beach at Plain Bay tells the whole story: two palatial expatriate houses built but never occupied as part of a functioning resort, standing water from the partial excavation of what would have been a marina, several cleared but never-paved roadways cutting through the brush, and a few rusting bulldozers alongside a dilapidated construction trailer. A decade after the failure, all of it was still there. The beach, one of the most beautiful on the island, remained accessible only to children who came to camp and young people from Nassau who showed up to party. The resort that would have transformed it simply ceased to exist, leaving its infrastructure ghosts behind.
The physical scars of that project are visible on satellite imagery today.
The Flagship Failure: Four Seasons at Emerald Bay
The most famous failed resort development in Exumas history is not in the northern cays but on Great Exuma itself, at Emerald Bay. And because it involved a brand as globally recognized as the Four Seasons, it became impossible to hide or minimize.
The Four Seasons Resort Great Exuma at Emerald Bay was a $300 million, 500-acre property. It was, at the time of its construction, the only luxury property on Great Exuma. The resort opened and then struggled for four years before shuttering in 2007, going into receivership before being sold to Sandals in 2009. The official explanation involved difficulty attracting skilled Bahamian workers from Nassau to a remote island. A more honest accounting includes underfunded operating costs, the brutal isolation of the location, and a fundamental mismatch between the Four Seasons service model and the realities of life on a small Bahamian out island.
The property's story since then has itself become a tragicomedy of repeated reinvention. Sandals took it over and ran it as Sandals Emerald Bay, then closed it in August 2024 for conversion to a family-oriented Beaches resort. As of early 2026, the property has been shuttered for well over a year, entangled in a tax dispute between Sandals Resorts International and the Bahamian government. A government audit analyzing Sandals Emerald Bay financials between 2017 and 2022 found that the resort had underpaid taxes by over $284 million. Sandals disputes the figure. The resort sits closed. A $300 million development on 500 acres of what might be the most beautiful waterfront in the Caribbean chain, dark and locked.
The former Four Seasons Hotel and Sandals Resort is being converted to a Beaches Resort as of March 2026, with an expected opening in 2027. Nobody is betting heavily on that timeline.
The Less Visible Scars
The story at Emerald Bay gets told because the Four Seasons brand makes it impossible not to tell. The stories that don't get told are the dozens of smaller failures scattered up and down the chain.
Between Tar Bay and Hoopers Bay on Great Exuma, a paved driveway dead-ends into a graded lot that was once slated for a resort development. The tennis court still stands. The roads around it are visible on satellite imagery, going nowhere in particular. The development stalled after the 2008 recession.
At Lee Stocking Island, in the southern reaches of the chain, the Perry Institute for Marine Science, a once-significant research station founded in 1970, now sits abandoned. Its buildings are dilapidated, its airstrip is overgrown. The 600-acre island looks inhabited by ghosts. This is not a development failure in the traditional sense, but it represents the same phenomenon: serious outside investment in the Exumas, followed by departure and abandonment, leaving built infrastructure to slowly decay against one of the most visually spectacular natural backdrops on earth.
First-time visitors to Great Exuma often report the same jarring experience of the island's contradictions. The water and beaches are extraordinary. But the landscape through which you drive to reach them is, in one recent visitor's description, studded with "abandoned houses, houses and commercial properties in severe disrepair, litter, graded and abandoned lots with trash, ghosts of failed construction projects." George Town, the capital, has a reputation as genuinely ramshackle in ways that surprise tourists expecting something more polished.
The Problem Is Structural, and the Government Keeps Recreating It
The underlying dynamic is not mysterious. The Bahamian government needs development revenue. The Exumas offer spectacular land and seascapes that attract ambitious outside investors. Investors arrive with promises calibrated to the size of the government's ambitions. Government says yes. Developer gets the heads of agreement, gets the permits, starts the earthmoving. Market conditions shift, or the operating fundamentals prove unworkable, and the developer is gone.
What makes this particularly damaging in the Exumas is the ecological fragility of the environment. Scraped limestone and cleared brush don't easily regrow in a near-desert climate where rain is scarce and the soil is thin. Partially excavated shorelines alter tidal flows. Access roads, once cut, create pathways for erosion. The environmental cost of each failed development is not zero. It is real and in many cases permanent.
This dynamic is playing out right now, in real time, over a proposed $200 million Rosewood-branded resort on Sampson Cay in the central Exumas. The developer, a Miami-based firm called Yntegra, received government approval for a project that environmentalists, the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, neighboring resort operators, and the Save Exuma Alliance have all described as catastrophic for the local ecosystem. Joseph Darville, chairman of Save the Bays and Waterkeepers Bahamas, described the decision to permit dredging as "sacrilegious" and warned that the ecological damage could be irreversible.
The developer's lawyers sent legal threat letters to outspoken Bahamian critics, demanding apologies and warning people about what they could and couldn't say publicly. The Save Exuma Alliance called it an attempt to silence legitimate public concern. A petition calling for a halt to environmental clearances collected over 7,100 signatures. As of early 2026, the project's groundbreaking had proceeded despite the opposition.
Whether the Rosewood Exuma becomes a successful resort or another abandoned road network in a decade is genuinely unknowable. What is knowable is that the pattern that produced the ruins at Plain Bay, the shuttered hotel at Emerald Bay, and the decaying research station at Lee Stocking Island has not changed in any fundamental way.
Even Good Ideas Have Stalled
It is worth noting that the Exumas and the broader Bahamas are not without developers who have tried to do this thoughtfully. The results are not encouraging.
Schooner Bay, a new urbanist planned community on 222 acres on Great Abaco Island, was explicitly designed to avoid every mistake that prior Bahamian resort developments had made. Its original developer, Orjan Lindroth, studied the failure pattern closely. The project was built around a constructed harbor, mixed uses, walkable streets, geothermal cooling, stormwater management, local agriculture, and gradual expandability rather than a one-time speculative buildout. Urban planning academics held it up as a model. It was, on paper, exactly what conscientious development in the Bahamas should look like.
By the mid-2010s it had stagnated. Lindroth parted ways with the project in 2013 and 2014. A succession of foreign sales companies came and went with limited success. A decade later the development sat at somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of its intended buildout. By 2022, a Nassau-based financier called Sterling Global had to be brought in to rescue it, with plans to shift the model away from the residential community concept entirely and toward a resort-led development. The thing it was designed not to become.
The Staniel Cay Yacht Club, which has operated successfully in the middle of the Exumas chain for decades, is the closest thing the chain has to a genuine long-term success story in tourism development. It is also 18 boat slips, 12 cottages, a restaurant, and a bar. That is the scale at which things work here.
What that tells you is that the problem is not simply that bad developers make bad decisions. The structural conditions of the Exumas, the remoteness, the cost of materials, the thin labor market, the dependence on airlift, the ecological fragility that makes intensive development self-defeating, are hostile to large-scale outside investment almost regardless of how thoughtfully that investment is designed. The conscientious developer stagnates. The reckless developer scrapes roads into a pristine cay, goes bankrupt, and leaves. The outcome for the land is different in degree but not entirely in kind.
The Bahamian government keeps signing heads of agreement anyway, because the alternative, telling outside capital that the Exumas are largely off-limits to large-scale development, is a conversation nobody in Nassau has been willing to have. The result is a lot of roads going nowhere and rusting bulldozers on world-class beaches.
The Urgency to Preserve Paradise
The Exumas chain is, by any objective measure, one of the most ecologically extraordinary places that still exists in the Caribbean basin. The coral, the seagrass beds, the tidal flats, the clarity of the water: none of these are renewable on any human timescale once they're damaged. And the damage from development doesn't have to be a catastrophic single event. It accumulates. Road by road. Cleared lot by cleared lot. Failed project by failed project.
The Bahamas needs a regulatory structure that attaches meaningful environmental remediation requirements to development concessions, so that the cost of failure is borne by the developers who fail rather than by the ecosystem and the local communities they leave behind. Right now there is no such structure in any serious form. A developer can come in, scrape roads into a pristine cay, go bankrupt or change their mind, and walk away with no obligation to restore what they disturbed.
That is an extraordinary gift to give to outside capital, and an extraordinary cost to impose on one of the last genuinely wild places in the Caribbean.
The rusting bulldozers at Plain Bay have been sitting there for twenty years. Nobody sent a bill.
Roger Weber writes about cities, planning, and development for Capital Frontiers and New Cities Atlas. He conducted fieldwork in the Exumas while completing independent study research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
