Bimini reference

The islands of Bimini

What the Bimini district is made of, and what the census actually counts.

The name covers more than one thing, which is where most confusion about Bimini starts. In ordinary use it means the two inhabited islands off which almost everything happens. In Bahamian administrative use it means a district that extends roughly 100 miles south to take in banks and cays nobody lives on.

The three islands

North Bimini is the hook-shaped island that carries almost all of the tourism infrastructure and the great majority of the population. It runs roughly seven and a half miles from the southern tip northward, and for most of that length it is narrow enough to cross on foot in a few minutes.

South Bimini lies across a short channel from North Bimini's southern tip and is quieter and more wooded. It holds the airport, the limestone well long associated with the Fountain of Youth legend, and the Bimini Biological Field Station — the shark research station usually called the Shark Lab, whose work on the island's lemon shark nursery has run since 1990.

East Bimini is the least like the other two. It is not a settled island but a spread of mangrove cays and flats reaching north and east from South Bimini, largely undeveloped, and it matters chiefly as habitat — it is the nursery ground the Shark Lab's lemon shark research is built on, and the shallow water that makes the bonefishing here what it is.

The settlements on North Bimini

North Bimini's three settlements run into one another without a visible break; in practice only signage marks where one ends and the next begins.

• Alice Town, at the southern tip, is the historic centre — the hotels, the bars and most of what a visitor sees. The Bimini Big Game Club is here, and so was the Compleat Angler until it burned in 2006.
• Bailey Town, immediately north, is the more residential of the three.
• Porgy Bay is northernmost, adjoining the large resort development on the island's northern end.

What the district legally contains

This is the part that trips up most descriptions of Bimini. The census does not enumerate a district called simply "Bimini". It enumerates"Bimini, Cay Lobos & Cay Sal" — and those last two are nowhere near the Bimini chain. The Cay Sal Bank sits well to the south, between Cuba and Andros, closer to Cuban water than to Bimini. It is administered as part of this district and is otherwise unconnected to it, geographically or in any way a visitor would notice.

Population, and how it has moved

The district has grown substantially and quickly. The census records 1,717 people at the 2000 count, 1,988 in 2010 and 2,361 in 2022 — a rise of just under nineteen per cent across the most recent intercensal period, against a national increase over the same period that was considerably smaller.

Household composition moved at the same time, and in the direction that usually indicates in-migration for work rather than natural increase: the district went from 751 households averaging 2.7 people in 2010 to 1,130 households averaging 2.1 in 2022. The number of households rose by half while the average household got smaller.

What we could not confirm

Two things, stated here rather than papered over.

The ownership and access status of East Bimini. It is frequently described as privately held. We have not found a documentary source establishing that, and this page therefore does not assert it.

A precise land area for North and South Bimini alone. The census gives 11 square miles for the whole district. Commonly quoted figures of around nine square miles for the two inhabited islands appear widely but we have not traced them to a survey or a government source, so they are not repeated here as fact.

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