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Bermuda

North America

A cluster of coral islands alone in the North Atlantic, some 1,000 kilometres off the Carolinas, Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory of pastel cottages, pink-sand beaches and the world's northernmost coral reefs. Those reefs have wrecked more than 300 documented ships over five centuries, making the island the Shipwreck Capital of the Atlantic and a premier wreck-diving destination. Bermuda is also one of sailing's spiritual homes, host of the 2017 America's Cup and the long-running King Edward VII Gold Cup, while ashore the UNESCO town of St. George's, the fortified Royal Naval Dockyard and the two-day Cup Match holiday carry a history that runs from the 1609 Sea Venture wreck to emancipation.

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What you can do in Bermuda

Museums & Galleries

Royal Naval DockyardApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovThe National Museum of Bermuda is the island's largest museum and the place to understand how a speck of coral in the mid-Atlantic ended up mattering so much. It occupies the Keep, the six-acre fortified citadel at the tip of the Royal Naval Dockyard, the base Britain built in the 19th century to guard its Atlantic sea lanes and nicknamed the Gibraltar of the West. Convict-built ramparts, bastions and the great 1820s Commissioner's House, the first house in the British Empire framed in cast iron, hold a collection of some 75,000 objects across 500 years of Bermudian history. The story runs from the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture, which stranded a group of English colonists here and led to the island's settlement and, through the survivors' accounts, is thought to have inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest, on through the Atlantic slave trade, privateering, the Royal Navy, the two-hulled Bermuda dinghy and the island's role in two world wars. The museum runs one of the region's serious underwater-archaeology programmes, so much of what is on display was raised from the very wrecks divers still visit. It takes a half day, and it gives the pretty West End the depth of history it deserves.

Sailing

King Edward VII Gold CupHamiltonOctBermuda is one of the spiritual homes of sailing, and Hamilton Harbour is where you watch the best of it up close. The island's deep, protected Great Sound hosted the 2017 America's Cup, and every October the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club runs the King Edward VII Gold Cup, a match-racing regatta first competed for in 1907 and one of the oldest trophies in the sport. Match racing is sailing distilled to a duel: two identical one-design keelboats, one against one, circling and luffing at the start before a short, tactical windward-leeward sprint, and because it is sailed in the tight confines of Hamilton Harbour, spectators watch the whole thing unfold a few metres from the seawall rather than as distant sails on a horizon. The Gold Cup is a stop on the World Match Racing Tour and pulls in the top skippers in the discipline, many of them America's Cup and Olympic sailors, so the standard is exceptional and the racing close. Around the regatta, the Great Sound and the island's steady sea breezes make Bermuda a fine place to sail more generally, but the Gold Cup in October is the reason to time a trip: world-class competition in a natural stadium, decided in minutes and metres.

Scuba Diving

Royal Naval DockyardApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovBermuda is the Shipwreck Capital of the Atlantic, and it earns the title. The island is the exposed tip of an undersea volcano ringed by the most northerly coral reefs on earth, a shallow, treacherous barrier that has claimed more than 300 documented ships over five centuries, from Spanish galleons and Civil War blockade runners to 19th and 20th century steamers. Many of those wrecks lie in only 5 to 15 metres of clear, warm water on the reef flats, so they are broken open, coral-encrusted and lit up, and divers of modest experience can swim them, while snorkellers enjoy the shallowest. The Cristobal Colon, the largest wreck in Bermudian waters, the paddle-wheeler Mary Celestia off the South Shore, and the Constellation, whose scattered cargo inspired the novel The Deep, are among dozens on offer, alongside living reef with parrotfish, barracuda and the occasional turtle. The Royal Naval Dockyard at the West End is the base of Bermuda's oldest dive company, running out of the old Victorian yard, and the Gulf Stream keeps the water warm enough to dive from spring to autumn. Few places pack this much accessible history and reef into water this shallow and this clear.

Witness / Attend

Cup MatchSt. George's, BermudaJul AugCup Match is Bermuda's biggest cultural event, a two-day cricket festival that is really a celebration of emancipation and identity. It grew out of the gatherings held by formerly enslaved Bermudians to mark the end of slavery in 1834, and since 1902 it has taken the form of an annual cricket match between the East End club, St. George's, and the West End club, Somerset, played over the two days before the first Monday of August. Those two days are a national public holiday, Emancipation Day and Mary Prince Day, and the whole island effectively stops. The venue alternates each year between the two clubs' grounds, and whichever end is hosting fills with tents, food stalls selling fish sandwiches and mussel pie, families in the colours of their team, and the distinctive gaming tables of Crown and Anchor, the one time and place gambling is openly allowed on the island. The cricket is fiercely contested and deeply followed, but the point is the gathering: three or four generations together, calypso and reggae, and a shared memory of freedom. For a visitor it is the truest window into Bermudian life there is, far from the pink-sand-and-cruise-ship image, and everyone is welcome to come and take it in.

Best months at a glance

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Museums
Sailing
Scuba Diving
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Bermuda