Nassau's history runs from Lucayan tool sites on the Clifton cliffs to pirate captains' mansions on West Hill Street, from limestone steps cut by enslaved hands to the freedom villages built for rescued Africans. Three days of walking it, mostly off Bay Street.
A 14th-century Augustinian cloister from Montréjeau, France, bought by William Randolph Hearst and rebuilt stone by stone in 1962 by Huntington Hartford. Versailles Gardens' marble terraces step down to the harbour. Open dawn to dusk.
The mansion was raised around 1740 by John Howard Graysmith, captain of the privateer Graycliff. Lunch under the Colonial Room's beams with a 250,000-bottle cellar below, and the Heritage Museum of the Bahamas in the same garden.
Lucayan tool sites, the ruined 18th-century Whylly plantation great house and the stone huts of its enslaved workers sit on one cliff-top trail. The Sacred Space carvings face the sea, honouring Africans lost on the crossing.
Founded in 1831 for Africans taken off the slave ship Rosa and landed by the Royal Navy. The single lane still runs past 1830s cottages, Adelaide Primary School and a shallow beach where descendants of those families still set nets.
Sixty-six steps hacked from solid limestone by enslaved labourers in the 1790s, later renamed for Queen Victoria's 66-year reign. At the top, Lord Dunmore's 1793 Fort Fincastle is built in the shape of a paddle-steamer's bow.
Lunch in the walled courtyard of a 19th-century townhouse on Bank Lane, directly behind the pink 1815 Parliament buildings and the old Supreme Court. Bahamian-Italian kitchen; the lobster ravioli and grilled grouper are the fixtures.
Vendue House, built around 1769, is where enslaved people were auctioned until 1834. The museum takes its name from Pompey, who led the 1830 revolt on Rolle's Exuma estate, and hangs Amos Ferguson's paintings upstairs.
The oldest surviving fort on New Providence, built in 1741 to Peter Henry Bruce's design to guard the harbour's eastern entrance. US Marines seized it in March 1776 in their first amphibious landing. Cannon still face the channel.
A pink two-storey cedar house from the 1790s, the oldest wooden residence in Nassau, with a mahogany staircase said to have been lifted from a ship. Loyalist-era furniture inside, and a detached kitchen block out in the yard.
Grant's Town and Bain Town were laid out from 1825 south of the ridge for freed and Liberated Africans. Walk Baillou Hill Road past St Agnes Church, consecrated 1848, and the clapboard shotgun houses packed around it.
Father Jerome Hawes, the architect-priest behind the Cat Island Hermitage, designed this Benedictine monastery; the monks completed it in 1947. The cloister walk, chapel and the guava jam sold at the gate are open to visitors.
Word of the 1834 emancipation reached Fox Hill's four African settlements a week late, so the village still keeps its own Fox Hill Day on the second Tuesday in August, with a march, brass band and the Freedom Park monument.