Downtown Nassau on Foot: The Queen's Staircase, the Forts and Bay Street

Nassau’s historic centre is small enough to walk in a morning and old enough to be worth it. The cruise port sits in the middle of it, which is both the convenience and the problem.

The scale of the crowd, and why it decides your morning

The port has, in its own words, “six new and expanded berths to accommodate the largest cruise ships in the world” and the “capacity to welcome over 33,000 passengers to our shores daily”. It handled over 5.6 million passengers in 2024.

Those people come ashore in a band of about three hours, into perhaps six streets.

Nothing about the walk below changes on a busy day except the experience of it. So: go early or go late. If you are staying on the island, downtown before nine is a different town — shopkeepers hosing pavements, no queue on the staircase, and the temperature still bearable. If you are off a ship, walk against the flow: do the staircase and the fort first, while everyone else is still in the shops, and come back to Bay Street on the way to the gangway.

The route

Everything here is within about fifteen minutes’ walk of the pier, and the only climb is at the end.

Bay Street starts roughly five minutes from the gangway and runs east–west along the harbour. Duty-free shops, colonial facades above the shopfronts, and the Straw Market about 300 metres from the port entrance — plaited baskets, hats and wood carving, with a good deal of imported stock mixed in. It is worth ten minutes and a look up: the interesting architecture is above eye level.

Parliament Square, a couple of blocks east and inland, is the postcard: salmon-pink Georgian buildings with green shutters around a small paved square, a white marble statue of Queen Victoria in the middle, and a few decorative cannons. The buildings still house parliament, so there is usually something happening. It is free and it takes five minutes.

The Queen’s Staircase is another ten minutes south and slightly uphill, through the Fort Fincastle historic complex. This is the reason to make the walk.

Sixty-five steps, and the one that is missing

The Queen’s Staircase was carved out of solid limestone between 1793 and 1794, cut by enslaved labourers to create a direct route from Fort Fincastle down to the town. The rise is 102 feet — 31 metres. It was named for Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century.

Count the steps and you will get 65. The original number was 66: the approach at the bottom was later paved, and the lowest step is buried under the asphalt. If somebody tells you the count is wrong, that is why.

The staircase sits in a narrow limestone gorge and is shaded almost all day, which makes it the one attraction in Nassau that is more comfortable at noon than at nine. It is free to walk. There are usually people at the top and bottom offering to guide or photograph you; a polite no is a complete answer, and a tip is a choice, not a fee.

It is also, unavoidably, a monument to forced labour that is mostly visited as a photo stop. The plaque is brief. If that history is why you came, the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation on Bay Street treats it properly and is a short walk back downhill.

Fort Fincastle and the other two

Fort Fincastle stands at the top of the staircase on Bennet’s Hill, the highest point in Nassau. Lord Dunmore built it in 1793 and mounted seven guns on it — two 24-pounders, two 32-pounders, two 12-pounders and a howitzer. It is a small fort, and the view is the reason to stand on it. Seen from above it is shaped like the bow of a paddle-wheel steamer, which is easier to believe from the walls than from the ground.

Nassau’s two other forts are not in walking distance and are bigger: Fort Charlotte, west of town — the largest of the three, built by Dunmore in 1789, whose 42 cannons have never been fired in anger — and Fort Montagu, east. All three, plus the Pompey Museum and the Balcony House, are run by the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation. Admission is a few dollars, and the opening hours are not the same on every day of the week — worth a check before you climb, because the walk up is the part you cannot undo.

Whether to take a guide

Downtown Nassau is entirely walkable without one, and the free route above costs nothing. What a guide adds here is context, because the buildings do not explain themselves.

A cultural walking tour of downtown (€48.29, 4.7 stars from 205 reviews, 3 hours) takes in Fort Fincastle, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, the Educulture museum, the Straw Market and Parliament Square. Audio headsets, bottled water and the National Art Gallery entry fee are in the price; hotel pickup, food and gratuities are not. The listing marks it as not suitable for people with mobility impairments, which is honest about the hill.

If three hours on your feet is too much, the electric trolley culture tour (€48.29, 4.7 stars from 802 reviews, 2 hours 30) is the most-reviewed guided tour on land in Nassau by a wide margin — only the big boat days are reviewed more often. It runs an open-air electric bus, stops at the rum cake factory for ten minutes, spends half an hour at Atlantis and visits the Queen’s Staircase, with Bahamian treats and Sky Juice along the way. It meets at the Straw Market on the cruise-port side of Bay Street, fifteen minutes before departure.

And if you would rather eat your history, a food and cultural walking tour (€80.45, 4.8 stars from 261 reviews, 3 hours) does five tastings through the old neighbourhood. Three things from its own small print are worth knowing before you book: the tour does not finish where it starts, shopping during the tour is not allowed, and neither is swimwear or see-through clothing. Unaccompanied minors are not accepted, and the listing states it is not suitable for wheelchair users.

That last rule about clothing is not prudishness — it is the one piece of local etiquette that visitors get wrong most often. Beachwear is for the beach; downtown, people are at work.

Practical

Walking surface. Pavements are narrow, uneven in places, and often have a high kerb. The climb to the fort is gentle but continuous. Trainers, not flip-flops.

Shade. There is very little of it on Bay Street. The staircase and the gorge around it are the exception.

Getting further out. The official destination information puts a jitney bus fare at about $1.50 per person one way, exact change required, and the water taxi across to Paradise Island at about $7 per person for a crossing of roughly ten minutes. Taxi fares from the airport are quoted at around $36 to downtown, $30 to Cable Beach and $45 to Paradise Island plus the bridge toll, based on two passengers, with extra charges for additional passengers and luggage. Traffic drives on the left.

Money. The Bahamian dollar is pegged one-to-one with the US dollar and both circulate. You will be given change in a mixture of the two.

How long it takes

The loop — Bay Street, Straw Market, Parliament Square, Queen’s Staircase, Fort Fincastle and back — is comfortably two hours at a walking pace with stops, three if you go into the fort and a museum. That leaves most of a port day free, which is the point.

More on land: 24 city tours and walks from €31.61, 29 food tours from €17.56, and 23 things to do in Nassau from €17.56. If the rest of your day belongs on the water, start with which swimming pig trip is which or snorkelling for beginners; with children in tow, Nassau with children covers the age limits.