16 things you didn’t know about The Bahamas, a land of sinkholes and swimming pigs – Telegraph.co.uk

The Bahamas is celebrating 44 years of independence from the UK. Here are a few quirky facts about these fascinating islands.

Many people talk about The Ukraine, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Maldives and The Netherlands. These are all wrong. Only two nations officially start with The. The Bahamas is one (the name means shallow water, FYI). Do you know the other?

Big Major Cay or Pig Beach is renowned for its porcine residents, who spend their time wallowing in the shallows. The porkers are victims of their own cuteness, however. Earlier this year several were found dead, with tourists blamed for overfeeding them.

Telegraph Travel spoke to the astronaut Chris Hadfield, best known for his Bowie rendition on the ISS, in January, and asked him which Earthly place looked most beautiful from his lofty orbit. The Bahamas are gorgeous, he replied. The deep trench in the ocean floor called the Tongue of the Ocean, which comes between the islands, is the most beautiful deep indigo colour.

The Bahamas has a weight problem even more so than the US. Almost 35 per cent of the adult population are considered obese, according to the CIA's World Factbook. For the US the figure is 33 per cent (in Britain its 27 per cent). Only 12 places are fatter, with American Samoa taking the biscuit (so to speak) on a whopping 74.6 per cent.

Thanks to sprinters like Pauline Davis-Thompson, Tonique Williams-Darling and Shaunae Miller, The Bahamas has won 14 Olympic medals. That works out at 33.9 per million residents only Finland, Sweden and Hungary have a better per capita strike rate.

OK, so The Bahamas might only have around 10 branches. But with a population of 390,000, that works out at more than 26 per million residents. Only three countries, the US, Canada and Monaco, have more Starbucks per capita.

The aquarium at the garish Atlantis Paradise Island resort encompasses 14 lagoons, eight million gallons of water and more than 50,000 aquatic animals from 250 species. Theres even a water slide that runs through the middle of it.

The Bahamas needs you. Almost 20 per cent of its GDP comes from tourism, a higher percentage than all but six places (Macau, Maldives, British Virgin Islands, Aruba, Seychelles and Anguilla). In fact, the country attracts 3.7 overseas visitors each year for every resident, making it one of 51 nations where tourists outnumber locals.

And its named, rather unimaginatively, Pink Sands. Noelle Nicolls, our expert on The Bahamas, says: Some visitors suffer disappointment when they realise the beach is not entirely pink as some doctored photos suggest. A unique mix of coral, broken shells, miniature rocks and calcium carbonate speckles the sand with pink fragments.

Dean's Blue Hole, off Long Island, is the second deepest salt water sinkhole on Earth, plunging 202 metres. Only Dragon Hole, in the South China Sea, with a depth of 300.89 metres, can top it.

The Bahamas is the third most expensive country in the world to live, according to Numbeo's annual cost of living survey, which takes into account the price of around 50 items, including a wide variety of accommodation, food and drink from both supermarkets and restaurants, clothing, taxi fares, leisure activities, utility, internet and mobile phone bills. Only Bermuda and Switzerland are costlier.

Its not just piggies. Noelle Nicolls explains: Sandy Cay (also known as White Cay) is an uninhabited island at the southern tip of the Exuma chain. Easily accessible from Long Island, it's a beautiful sanctuary for critically endangered White Cay Rock Iguanas. When you arrive, the iguanas come crawling out of the native bush to greet you on the beach or along the rocky part of the shoreline. They are harmless and will run away if you step towards them too suddenly.

Pirates, privateers and buccaneers infested the area from the early 1600s to the 1700s, wrote Ben Fogle for The Telegraph in 2015. The shallow waters provided the perfect place for experienced pirates to lure heavily laden merchant ships and Spanish galleons on to the reefs, where they were wrecked and relieved of their cargos.

The most famous pirate was Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who was appointed magistrate of the self-declared Pirates Republic, a stronghold in Nassau which brought 11 years of havoc to the region.

Learn more at the Pirates of Nassau Museum or on an Islandz Rum Tour.

Thunderball Grotto is an accessible underwater cave that sits in the middle of a little island (probably better categorised as a big rock) in The Exumas, says Noelle Nicolls. It gets its name from the James Bond film Thunderball, which used the cave for underwater battle scenes. When you drop anchor, the entrance to the cave is not readily visible as most of it is underwater. Getting in is intimidating, but once you do, you can swim and breathe on the surface of the water as you snorkel around the hollowed-out chamber.

You cant drive on the Bimini Road, as its underwater and is actually a rock formation. Some believe it to be part of the legendary lost city of Atlantis. They are wrong. It is just a rock formation.

A sombre note to finish on. The Bahamas is one of 58 countries that still have the death penalty. It is, however, considered abolitionist in practice, with the last execution taking place in 2000 (unlike Iran, for example, where more than 977 took place in 2015).

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16 things you didn't know about The Bahamas, a land of sinkholes and swimming pigs - Telegraph.co.uk