Big Major Cay carries no permanent human population, no road and no dock — only a crescent of white sand and a herd of feral swine that swims out to meet arriving hulls. The island lies roughly 130 kilometres southeast of Nassau, midway down the limestone chain of the Exuma Cays.
Travellers searching for a nassau to pig beach flight are, in practice, looking for the airstrip at neighbouring Staniel Cay, the small settlement that has served as the gateway to this stretch of the archipelago for decades.
The origin of the herd remains unsettled. One account holds that sailors left the animals as a living larder and never returned. Another credits farmers on Staniel Cay who moved their stock offshore to keep it clear of vegetable plots. Neither version carries documentation. What is certain is that the pigs were a local curiosity long before they were a global one: photographs from the 1990s show a handful of animals and an empty beach. Social media changed the arithmetic. By the mid-2010s the swimming pigs of the Exumas had become one of the most photographed sights in the Bahamas, and Big Major Cay acquired the informal name it now carries.
Attention brought pressure. After deaths within the herd in 2017, Bahamian authorities tightened oversight of feeding and handling, and operators running nassau to pig beach flight tours and sea crossings alike now work under rules written to protect the animals rather than the itinerary. The beach itself remains common ground. Entry costs 0 USD, the shoreline is open from 00:00 to 23:59 every day of the week, and no gate, ticket booth or turnstile stands between the sand and the water.
The surrounding geography rewards attention. Thunderball Grotto, a tidal limestone cave used as a location for the 1965 Bond film that gave it its name, sits minutes away off Staniel Cay. North of it lies the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, established in 1958 as one of the world's first marine protected areas. The banks between here and New Providence run shallow enough that the water reads as three distinct greens from altitude — a detail that makes any nassau to pig beach flight tour, and every hull that crosses the same channel, a study in colour before it is anything else. The address at the end of it never changes: Big Major Cay, Exuma, The Bahamas.
4 hr
