Bimini reference

The North Bimini resort development and the opposition to it

A sourced account of the development, the environmental case against it, the economic case for it, and the litigation — including the recovered text of a quotation that is usually cited to a dead link.

This is the largest single thing that has happened to Bimini in living memory, and it is documented worse than its scale deserves. The standard online account rests on a campaign website that no longer exists and a newspaper URL that no longer resolves. What follows is assembled from the archived original of that newspaper report, the published science, the court record, and contemporaneous Bahamian business reporting from both sides of the argument.

What was built, and when

Large-scale plans for the northern end of North Bimini were first approved under the Pindling government in 1984. Nothing came of them at that point. In 1995 the Miami-based Cuban-American developer Gerardo Capo acquired the property for $3m, and his construction company RAV Bahamas launched the present development in 1997. The first phase of the resort opened in 2007. Those dates are from Larry Smith's account in The Tribune in October 2013, which remains the most detailed single timeline published in the Bahamian press.

The original scheme, as Smith described it, covered 750 acres including five miles of North Bimini ocean frontage and part of the island's mangrove wetland, and comprised a high-rise hotel, a 10,000-square-foot casino, thousands of residential units, a golf course, a commercial centre and a dredged channel around the lagoon. The 750-acre figure is also the operator's own: the Resorts World Bimini website described the property as a “750-acre beachfront resort” with 305 rooms and “the largest marina complex in the Bahamas” when we checked it on 12 August 2026.

The Malaysian Genting group entered the project in the early 2010s. By October 2013 The Tribune put RAV Bahamas' total investment at $250m and itemised Genting's additional spending as $70m on a cruise ship, $24m on the casino and $150m on a 350-room hotel. The property has traded as Resorts World Bimini since. The hotel tower operated as the Hilton at Resorts World Bimini from 2015 until it left the Hilton system on 1 April 2025.

The habitat, and what the science measured

North Bimini's mangrove system is the reason the dispute is not simply a planning argument. The Bimini Biological Field Station describes it as the only mangrove nursery habitat on the western edge of the Great Bahama Bank, and records over 370 animal species within the boundaries proposed for a reserve, of which eleven are listed as Threatened, Endangered or Critically Endangered — among them the smalltooth sawfish, the Bimini boa and three species of sea turtle. The station's long-running mark-recapture work on juvenile lemon sharks in the North Sound is what turned the argument from assertion into data. It is the same institution that runs the shark research facility on South Bimini.

The key published result is Jennings and others, in Environmental Biology of Fishes in 2008. Its abstract states that the North Sound was subject to intermittent dredging from 1999, most intensively in March 2001. Comparing the North Sound against control nurseries at Sharkland and South Bimini using a before-after, control-impact design, the authors found:

• no statistically significant difference in juvenile lemon shark growth rates before and after March 2001;
• a statistically significant reduction in survival in the North Sound after March 2001, including a 23.5% decline in first-year survival;
• mean percentage cover of the seagrass Thalassia testudinum down 17.7% between 2003 and 2005.

The authors describe their result as a correlation between the development to that point and the decline, not a demonstrated causal chain, and they end by proposing further research rather than claiming the question closed. That distinction matters and is frequently dropped when the figures are quoted.

Two later papers complicate the picture in ways worth stating. DiBattista and colleagues, inEvolutionary Applications in 2011, found that after the habitat loss neutral genetic variation in the Bimini lemon shark population increased rather than decreased — explicitly contrary to their initial expectations — while the strength of natural selection on body length and mass weakened considerably. A 2021 paper in Ecological Indicators found differential DNA methylation in sharks from the North nursery closest to the dredging, correlated with manganese concentrations, while noting that metal concentrations were low at all sites. None of this is a clean single-direction story, and a reference page should not present it as one.

The case against

The clearest statement of the opposition case is a report by Rogan M. Smith in the Bahamian press, carried under a Freeport News banner on the Nassau Guardian website and headlined “Environmentalist: Bimini Bay project a 'catastrophe'.” It reports the French oceanographer and film-maker Jean-Michel Cousteau, who had criticised the development in an internationally published article.

Cousteau's argument as reported was specific rather than general. Garbage was being incinerated on the grounds and waste was leaching into the bay and the ocean. Dredging the channel and building artificial islands had created a siltation problem disrupting currents and water clarity, which in turn killed sea grasses and organisms in the bay. He objected to destroying mangrove forest in order to dredge new land for further development, and argued that the marine protected area then under discussion would cover what was considered the most vital mangrove forest in the Bahamas. He described the Capo Group's phase II plan — more condominiums and a golf course — as the point at which the damage would become irreversible, and said that establishing the protected area instead would be “a victory for all.”

“Allowing Bimini Bay to continue with phase II would certainly strip this inland paradise of its precious natural riches. Over time, visitors and residents alike will suffer the decline of economic, social and environmental prosperity.”

Jean-Michel Cousteau, as reported by Rogan M. Smith, The Nassau Guardian — quoted here from the Internet Archive capture of 3 June 2008

The same report described the property as “a joint project of the Hilton Hotel Company and the Capo Group of South Florida” and quoted Cousteau saying that the shoreline could still be restored: “it's not too late to halt development, establish the MPA and let nature take its course.” That is a materially different position from opposition to the resort as such, and it is worth recording accurately.

The case for

Bimini's population is small, its economy is narrow, and the development is by a wide margin the largest employer ever to operate on the island. Smith's October 2013 column, which was broadly critical of the project's environmental handling, also set out the other side as it was being made at the time: more than 500 people already employed, of whom seventeen were foreign nationals; a further 300 expected to be hired by that December; and a daily flow of visitors through Alice Town — Smith's illustration was two hundred people a day moving through the settlement by tram in October — reaching businesses that had no other source of custom. The argument advanced locally was not abstract: employment at the resort was what allowed people to pay rent and buy groceries.

The developer's side also contested the environmental framing directly. The Save Bimini Association's own homepage in 2006 reproduced a quotation from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of 2 July in which Rafael Reyes, president of the Bimini resort project for Capo, said the developer was following the recommendations of Hilton's consultants, “who determined that not all mangroves need to be preserved.” The campaign reproduced it as evidence against the project; read straight, it is also the clearest surviving statement of the developer's position, which was that the mangrove clearance was consultant-approved and proportionate. We have not seen the underlying Sun-Sentinel article and are relying on the campaign's reproduction of it.

The economic case has aged badly, though not in the direction either party expected. See where it stands now.

Save Bimini, and what became of it

The Save Bimini Association was the residents' campaign against the development. Its website, savebimini.org, is the primary record of the campaign and it no longer exists in any usable form: the domain now serves unrelated commercial content. Everything below comes from Internet Archive captures, and is labelled as such.

The capture of 13 August 2006 carries the association's statement of itself: individuals “dedicated to the preservation of Bimini's delicate ecological environment,” arguing that “at no time in our history has our tiny island's eco-system been so threatened,” that what had already been destroyed was devastating, and that the plans for the future threatened Bimini's heritage for generations. That capture also hosted a scan of aNational Geographic article, a Bahamian press item quoting the ecologist Romauld Ferreira on the “total clear-cutting” of that portion of Bimini and the absence of any penalty for it, and the Reyes quotation above. It links a paper by Ruba Marshood of Duke University on the North Sound lagoon against the resort, given an honourable mention in a 2005 science-writing competition. Those items are the campaign's selection and presentation of other people's reporting; we have not independently retrieved the originals.

By the captures of March 2009, May 2012 and April 2016 the site had been rebuilt with a navigation of Home, In the News, About Bimini, Who We Are, Research, Get Involved, Links, Watch Our Video, Contact and Donate, but the visible homepage text is the same mission statement, unchanged across a decade.

We read the Internet Archive's index of the domain on 12 August 2026. It shows the last successful captures of the campaign site in April 2016, HTTP 403 responses from October 2016 through 2017, and from 2019 onward a completely different site on the same domain: a commercial blog on unrelated subjects, with none of the campaign's content. Two conclusions follow. The campaign is defunct and the domain has been repurposed, so any live link to savebimini.org now points at content the association never wrote — and the Internet Archive captures are the only surviving record of it, which makes them legitimate evidence provided they are cited as captures.

The courts

The legal fight was carried by a different body, Bimini Blue Coalition Limited, a company formed by island residents. Its target was the cruise-ship terminal: a dock extending roughly 1,000 feet from North Bimini and a 4.5-acre artificial island built offshore from dredged seabed material.

The proceedings are documented in a primary source of unusual quality for a dispute of this size: the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council's judgment in Bimini Blue Coalition Limited v The Prime Minister of The Bahamas and others [2014] UKPC 23, handed down on 24 July 2014. The Board had itself granted an interim injunction on 23 May 2014, after a permit under the Conservation and Protection of the Physical Landscape Act was produced overnight — the government having initially argued that the Act did not apply. Longley J discharged that injunction on 30 May 2014 following a four-day hearing with witness evidence. The Court of Appeal upheld him, and the Board dismissed the further appeal, holding that “there was no error of law or perversity of fact in the judge's decision to set aside the injunction, and the Court of Appeal was right to uphold it.”

Alongside the substantive litigation the Coalition was ordered to put $250,000 into escrow as security for the government's costs. Reporting the order in March 2014, The Tribune's Neil Hartnell quoted the environmental consultant Gail Woon calling it “the kiss of death” for a challenge brought by residents of a small island. Whatever view is taken of the merits, the practical effect of a costs order at that level on a community-funded claimant is not seriously disputed.

The reserve that was never gazetted

The alternative both sides discussed — a protected area covering the surviving mangrove — has been under discussion for a quarter of a century and has never been brought into force.

On the Bimini Biological Field Station's account: the Bahamian government proposed a national network of marine protected areas in 2000, with North Bimini identified as the top priority location; community meetings on boundaries ran from 2000 to 2002; a town meeting in January 2009 announced the newly declared reserve to Bimini residents; and in June 2012 modified and expanded boundaries were proposed because of mangrove loss in the interim. The station states that as of 2021 there had never been a formal or official imposition of the reserve. The designation as described would be a no-take zone, with catch-and-release bonefishing and local land-crab harvesting permitted.

We did not find evidence that this has changed since. If a reader can point to a Gazette notice establishing the North Bimini Marine Reserve, we want it: that is the single most useful missing document on this page.

Where it stands now

The resort is operating and is in serious financial difficulty, and the two owners are in court with each other in Florida.

In September 2025 The Tribune reported that Genting Americas — which holds 78% of the venture against RAV Bahamas' 22%, through the Bahamian company BB Entertainment — had described Resorts World Bimini as a “financial failure” in filings to a south Florida federal court. The reporting put construction cost at $310m, liabilities at around $600m of which 0.1% had been repaid, and stated that the property had never made a profit. Between 150 and 200 staff were given notice in mid-September to vacate employer-provided housing by the end of that month, some after seven or eight years in it. RAV Bahamas alleges that Genting used its majority control to load liabilities from other Genting operations onto the Bimini books; Genting denies it.

As of The Tribune's report of 22 May 2026 that litigation was unresolved: Genting Americas had moved to dismiss RAV's $600m claim on the procedural ground that RAV had not obtained Bahamian Supreme Court permission to bring a derivative action, RAV disputed that this barred the US proceedings, and the court had not ruled. The same report described the property as a 300-plus room resort with a casino and marina, and noted that the dispute threatened to paralyse board decision-making.

Cruise traffic continues. In July 2026 The Tribune reported a dispute between two Bimini water-sports operators over access to the Fisherman's Village docks serving cruise passengers, with Royal Caribbean, Celebrity and Virgin Voyages business named in it — a reminder that the development is now simply the infrastructure through which a large share of the island's visitors arrive, and that the arguments about it have moved on to who gets to work on it. Practical information on lodging inside and outside the complex is in the stay directory and our write-up of where to stay.

Note on the citations, and a misquotation

This section is for anyone auditing sources rather than reading about the development.

The Nassau Guardian URL usually cited for the Cousteau quotation,thenassauguardian.com/national_local/341521988113548.php, is dead. The Internet Archive's index shows successful captures from June 2008 to February 2014, HTTP 404s through 2016, and redirect-then-404 behaviour since. The content is fully recoverable from the capture of 3 June 2008, which is what this page quotes. Anyone repairing a citation to this article should attach that capture rather than the bare URL.

Separately, the two Internet Archive captures of savebimini.org that carry the campaign's own words are genuine primary evidence of what the campaign said, and are cited as captures below. They are not evidence for the underlying newspaper and magazine articles the campaign reproduced on its pages. Those need retrieving from their own publishers, and we have not done it.

Facts on this page were last checked against the sources below on 12 August 2026.