No document records who first put pigs on Big Major Cay. The island lies roughly 80 miles southeast of Nassau, uninhabited by people, and its swimming pigs arrived without paperwork.
Two accounts compete — sailors who left livestock ashore, or farmers from neighbouring Staniel Cay wanting a quiet pen — and neither has been settled by the archive. What is verifiable is the outcome: a colony of feral swine that wades chest-deep into the shallows and paddles toward approaching hulls, which is why nassau to pig beach boat tours now hold a fixed line in nearly every Exumas itinerary.
The cay belongs to the Exuma Cays, a 120-mile chain of limestone islets strung between Nassau and Great Exuma. Water here runs over white carbonate sand at depths of two to four feet, producing the pale turquoise band visible from aircraft and satellite alike. That geology is the entire reason the animals swim: the bank shelves so gently that a pig can stand where a boat still floats. The beach itself is public and unenclosed. Entry costs 0 BSD, and because there is no gate to close, the sand is open 00:00–23:59, Monday through Sunday, at Big Major Cay (Pig Beach), Exumas, Bahamas.
Significance now extends past the animals. Big Major sits within reach of Thunderball Grotto, the tidal cave at Staniel Cay used as a film set in 1965, of the nurse sharks at Compass Cay, and of the rock iguanas on Bitter Guana Cay. A single crossing therefore threads four habitats — sandbar, grotto, patch reef, and iguana ground — which explains why the Bahamian tourism authority treats the Exuma swimming pigs day trip as a national asset rather than a novelty. Conservationists press the opposite case with equal force: these are livestock on a fragile cay, and their fame outran any management plan.
Both readings are defensible, and both are visible from the water. The pigs are unfenced, unticketed, and indifferent to the argument. Turtle grass beds, conch middens on the shallows, and the long white spit that appears at low tide fill out the geography around them. Seen plainly, a nassau to pig beach boat tour is a transect across one of the shallowest carbonate banks on earth, with a herd of swimming pigs as its most photographed waypoint and Staniel Cay's cliffs closing the horizon behind.
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