Pig Beach (also officially known as Big Major Cay Bahamas) is an uninhabited island in the Bahaman Exuma Cays. The Bahamas island is only 1 mile long, making it quite small for the large number of visitors its receveis.
The Pigs swim with tourists at Major Cay Bahamas
On the sandy beach of this Bahamas island, there are a bunch of pigs who retrieve food from passing boats and bathe with visitors. They are the only imhabitants of Big Major Cay, except for a few stray cats and goats.
Staniel Cay is the largest island in proximity to Big Major Cay. This is where you can catch a swimming pigs tour, which is one of the top attractions on the island. The Staniel Cay to Majoy Cay is about a fifteen minute boat ride to Pig Beach.
However, people started to visit and feed the 20 or so pigs living on the island. Now they have mostly abandoned foraging for food in the forest. Instead, the pigs now favor eating what was thrown to them from boats and on the shore. The beach started to become quite popular with boating tourists, and was the location was appropriately nicknamed 'Pig Beach.'
I took a boat near the shore in this photograph, and three pigs immediately started to swim in the crystal clear ocean water to greet me. One of the three pigs was a more significant adult, while the other two were young piglets.
History of this Swimming Pigs Island
There are many opinions as to how the pigs got on the island, the most common one is that residents of Staniel Cay placed there intentionally. The rational of the story is that Staniel Cay started as a farming and introduced the pigs to the island. However, the pigs pigs were smelly and the locals wanted them off the island. Thus moving them to Pig Beach Major Cay Bahamas.
I find that story hard to believe. I have been boating to the many of the island and they are small the the wind is brisk. Any smell would not cause a problem.
There are aother stories like the pigs swam to the island when a boat sank, or local sailors brought them to the island to eat but were called away on an emergency.
Map of the location of Major Cay Bahamas
