This Hotel in The Bahamas Might Be the Island Escape You’ve Been Waiting For, With a Mini Tiki Bar and a Pristine Beach
You walk out of your cottage and the world goes quiet. Just the wind, the waves, and the scent of salt.
This is The Sands Hotel on San Salvador — not a resort, not a compound. Just 20 rooms set across a handful two-story cottages, a white-sand beach, and a tiny tiki bar where the rum pours freely and the sunsets show up on time.
It’s a kind of secret, the kind of place you don’t find unless you’re looking for it — and even then, only if you’re lucky.
The beach isn’t crowded. It’s yours. Step out of your room, toes in sand. The water is electric blue, impossibly clear, as if the sea forgot how to hide anything. You could spend the day floating just offshore, watching the clouds drift overhead, the gentle surf the only sound you need.
And then there’s that tiki bar.
It’s just steps from your door, tucked beneath palms, a few wooden stools and a bartender who remembers your name — and your drink. It might be a Goombay Smash. Or a Kalik. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s cold, and the breeze is warm, and the whole thing feels like a postcard someone forgot to send.
The rooms are quiet and simple, but with everything you need: air conditioning, Wi-Fi, daily housekeeping — and more importantly, nothing you don’t. There’s no DJ, no pool foam party. Just a slow rhythm of days spent swimming, exploring, and sipping rum punches until the sun slips below the horizon.
At night, the stars come out. The sky here doesn’t have much competition. You might walk the beach again. You might sit at the bar a little longer. Or you might just fall asleep to the sound of the surf outside your window.
This isn’t Nassau. It’s not even Eleuthera. It’s San Salvador — remote, quiet, beautiful. A 63-square-mile island where the modern world barely whispers, and a little hotel that understands that sometimes the best luxury is not being bothered.
The Sands isn’t trying to impress you. It’s just trying to be what it is. And that, it turns out, is exactly what you needed.
How do you get to San Salvador? Bahamasair has weekly flights from Miami, or several times per week out of Nassau.
Rates at The Sands start at $250.
Guy Britton is the managing editor of Caribbean Journal. With more than four decades of experience traveling the Caribbean, he is one of the world's foremost experts covering the region.
