Paradise lost? How cruise companies are ‘eating up’ the Bahamas

Joseph Darville has fond memories of swimming with his young son off the south coast of Grand Bahama island, and watching together as scores of dolphins frolicked offshore. A lifelong environmentalist now aged 82, Darville has always valued the rich marine habitat and turquoise blue seas of the Bahamas, which have lured locals and tourists alike for generations.

The dolphins are now mostly gone, he says, as human encroachment proliferated and the environment deteriorated. “You don’t see them now; the jetskis go by and frighten them off.

“There’s a lot going on. It’s a tragedy – and continues to be a tragedy,” says Darville.

• Joseph Darville is worried that the big cruise lines and developers will ‘come in and eat what’s left of our country’. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/the Guardian

Now, he fears further acceleration of the decline, with the scheduled opening next year of Carnival Cruise Line’s vast Celebration Key resort, now under construction on the island’s south coast.

The sprawling entertainment complex across a mile-long beach, already stripped of its protective mangroves, will ultimately bring up to an additional 4 million people a year to the island, Carnival says, with four of its ships able to dock simultaneously.

Concerns about giant cruise ships bringing multitudes of tourists, and pollution, to the ecologically fragile Bahamas are nothing new. Neither is the concept of foreign-owned cruise companies buying land to build private retreats exclusively for their passengers: Disney’s Castaway Cay, a private island near Great Abaco, last year celebrated its 25th birthday.

But if only for their scale alone, Celebration Key and two other expansive developments just like it, either recently opened or being built elsewhere in the 700-island archipelago, represent a worrisome new threat, campaigners say.

Cruise companies have spent at least $1.5bn (£1.1bn) since 2019 buying or leasing land in the Caribbean, according to a Bloomberg analysis in May, and Darville wonders what that means for the future of his beloved islands.

• Carnival Cruise Line’s huge Celebration Key resort under construction on Grand Bahama island. Photograph: Carnival Cruise Line

As executive chair of the environmental group Save the Bays, he was part of an alliance that fought against the Grand Bahama development, as well as Disney’s Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point, which opened on Eleuthera island in June, and Royal Caribbean’s Royal Beach Club at Paradise Island, which broke ground in April.

“It has to stop somewhere; we have to preserve something for our future generations, for our own native Bahamians,” Darville says. “We cannot always be seduced by these cruise lines and other developers who come in and eat what’s left of our country.”

The “seductions” he sees are the cruise lines touting the supposed economic advantages to the Bahamas of being allowed to buy and develop land, promoting what he claims are questionable environmental credentials, and pledging community investments for locals in terms of jobs and grants for small businesses and education.

Such messaging has been well received in a country still struggling to recover from Hurricane Dorian in 2019, the worst natural disaster in its history, which prompted the near-collapse of the tourism industry.

An unemployment rate that reached almost 20% after the storm and subsequent Covid-19 pandemic has finally dropped back into single figures, but a stroll around once-bustling Freeport, the largest town, cruise port and commercial hub of Grand Bahama, provides plenty of evidence of the island’s decline.

The waterfront 542-room Grand Lucayan resort, formerly the grande dame of Grand Bahamian tourism, sits mostly empty, abandoned and awaiting a buyer, with only a small portion of the development still open.

• The aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, when floods and 180mph winds devastated the Bahamas. Photograph: Adam Delgiudice/AFP/Getty Images

The adjacent straw market, once a thriving hub of souvenir stalls, entertainment and refreshment, is largely bereft of customers, even when a cruise ship is in town. And taxi drivers can spend a day or more waiting at the airport or cruise terminal without earning a fare.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the cruise companies, amplified by the Bahamian government, honed their pitches for land deals to receptive ears, focused on the jobs they would create and the dollars they would bring in.

Carnival, for example, says all but two of the 31 construction companies working on Celebration Key are owned by Bahamians. Job fairs over the summer, offering employment with perks including medical insurance and paid time-off, were swamped.

• Castaway Cay, Disney Cruise Line’s private island resort in the Bahamas opened more than 25 years ago. Photograph: Dave G Houser/Alamy

Disney says it created more than 200 “high-quality” jobs for locals at Lookout Cay, has invested more than $1m into the local economy since it opened, and has promised almost as much again for playgrounds, sports fields and infrastructure for the island’s students.

On Paradise Island, Royal Caribbean’s deal for the 7-hectare (17-acre) site included a promise that Bahamians “will be invited” to own up to 49% of the venture.

The websites of all three projects are also heavy with words and phrases such as “environmental commitment”, “sustainability” and “responsibility”.

Meanwhile, Isaac Chester Cooper, the Bahamas’ tourism minister, continues to cite a Tourism Economics study, prepared for Carnival in 2019, stating that the “development, construction and ongoing operation of Celebration Key” would create thousands of Bahamian jobs and generate a $1.5bn boost for the Bahama’s GDP.

By contrast, Carnival Corporation recorded an all-time high $21.6bn annual revenue in 2023; Royal Caribbean’s revenue increased 57% year-on-year to $13.9bn; and that of Disney’s Magical Cruise Company, while smaller at $2.2bn, still represented a rise of almost 91%.

Cooper did not return a request for comment from the Guardian.

• An infinity pool at the Grand Lucayan Resort, Grand Bahama. The resort is now mostly empty and awaiting a buyer. Photograph: M Timothy O’Keefe/Alamy

Darville concedes it is harder to push an environmental message in such circumstances. “Whenever there’s word there’s going to be cruise ship development coming to the Bahamas, the first thing the government looks at, and the people generally, is how many people will be employed, what economic benefits we’re going to derive,” he says

He says that ignores the environmental impact and damage caused by developments on previously pristine Bahamas beaches. Mangrove destruction is a particular concern, given the protection the trees provide against storm surge from hurricanes.

But campaigners say the projects are also significantly detrimental to wildlife, in water and on land, as well as precious coral reefs already imperilled by rising sea temperatures.

• Gail Woon wants to help educate the next generation about the environmental challenges faced by the region and the world. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/the Guardian

At Lookout Cay, Disney built a half mile-long pier to allow cruise liners to dock, driving countless support posts deep into the seabed. The company insisted that “viable individual corals within the pier’s footprint were expertly relocated to improve the health of struggling coral reefs in the area”.

Darville is sceptical and worries about the effect on coral reefs and fish populations of thousands of people in the water slathered in chemical-based sunscreens. “When Disney was putting out its proposal, no matter what they said or how they did it, there was going to be a catastrophic impact,” he says.

Gail Woon, executive director of the educational non-profit group Earthcare, and partner of the Global Cruise Activist Network, an alliance of industry critics, says previous developments in the islands that were touted as environmentally friendly turned out to be anything but.

She cites a private golf resort where residences can cost tens of millions of dollars, but construction and operations destroyed coral just offshore.

“We had coral reef biologists testify that if you put a golf course on the beach and fertilise the grass, the run-off will go into the ocean and kill the coral because they can’t take large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus,” she says.

“They went ahead and did it anyway, then where there should have been pristine sand and clear water they have these big clumps of green and brown macro-algae that smothers the corals. They were destroying the product they were trying to promote.”

• Carnival Cruise line’s Celebration Key resort is scheduled to open next year. Photograph: Richard Luscombe/the Guardian

Through projects such as Earthcare’s EcoKids, Woon and others around the Bahamas are working to educate the next generation about environmental challenges facing the country and the world.

It’s a message reinforced at Conservation Cove, a small but thriving living laboratory east of Freeport where cruise ship tourists and pupils on school field trips learn the importance of coral reefs and mangrove restoration.

Javan Hunt, mangrove nursery coordinator at Conservation Cove, says: “If you make decisions based on ignorance you allow people to run over you, or sell you something that’s not in your best interest.

“So for me the most important thing is to educate those coming up, so that in five years, 10 years and beyond, they can make informed decisions – and won’t just smile when someone is presenting shit to them and telling them it’s treasure.”