Bahamas

8 records, and the shelf that dominates is Island Societies rather than resorts. This is the water of the private cay held by owners — Fowl Cay, Ambergris Cay, the Exuma clubs — where the guest is a visitor in somebody's community rather than a customer of a hotel.

The Exumas are the particular case: several hundred cays, banks shallow and clear enough to read from the air, and a culture of self-driven boats that exists almost nowhere else in this register. Several properties hand a powerboat to each villa as standard. What is bought here is a chart and a hull more than service.

Musha Cay is the outlier and the register keeps it as one — an island let whole with a designed programme of entertainments behind it, which is a different product from the family cays around it.

The Atlantic filing is deliberate and unfashionable. These are not Caribbean waters: winter swell and north wind reach the Bahamas and leave the southern Caribbean alone.