Atlantis Paradise Island.

Cabbage Beach, Paradise Island. Photograph © by Tracy Elizabeth

The Bahamas is an independent English-speaking nation in the West Indies, consisting of an archipelago of 700 islands and cays. The Bahamas is located in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Florida and the United States, north of Cuba and the Caribbean, and northwest of the British dependency of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The world's third longest barrier reef and about 14. 5% of the world's coral can be found in the Bahamas. The islands consist entirely of calcium carbonate, which is mainly produced by the organisms of coral reefs.

With 700 islands across some 100,000 sq. miles of ocean, each island of the Bahamas possesses individual diversity. The population consists of slighly more than 305,000 inhabitants.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the New World on the island of San Salvador in the eastern Bahamas. After observing the shallow sea around the islands, he said "baja mar" (shallow water or sea) and so named the area The Bahamas, The Islands of the Shallow Sea.