Paradise lost? Cruise ships are having a 'catastrophic impact' on the Bahamas, say activists

Joseph Darville has fond memories of swimming with his young son off the south coast of Grand Bahama island and watching together as dolphins frolicked offshore.

- Richard Luscombe

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," he says. "It's a tragedy and continues to be a tragedy."

Now he fears further decline with the opening next year of Carnival Cruise Line's Celebration Key resort 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 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.