Centuries of Change Shaped Bermuda From an Uninhabited Island to a Modern-day Beach Paradise—Here’s How to Experience Its Living History

Every Wednesday on the Lost Cultures: Living Legacies podcast, host Alisha Prakash, Travel + Leisure’s associate editorial director, explores a unique culture around the world and shares how you can learn more about it on your travels, too.

It’s easy to overlook Bermuda on a map. Its largest island is just 21 square miles, roughly 600 miles off the mainland coast. But it’s much harder to ignore the island’s place in history. For more than four centuries, this tiny archipelago has been a landing point, a launchpad, and a cultural crossroads. But how does all that history show itself today? How did an uninhabited outpost become home to a culture shaped by shipwrecks, slavery, migration, and resistance? And what does it mean to be Bermudian today? 

Bermuda: The Crossroads of the Atlantic

On this week’s episode of Lost Cultures: Living Legacies, we’re exploring Bermuda through the voices of the people who know it best, including Dr. Edward Harris, former director of the National Museum of Bermuda. Dr. Harris explains the island remained untouched by humans until the 1500s, as it was too remote for earlier navigators to reach. That changed with the rise of European sailing power, with Bermuda soon becoming a critical stopover for ships moving between Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. 

“It was one of those rare islands that was not settled until 500 odd years ago,” Dr. Harris says. “That is to say, 100,000 years after we left Africa as a human species, it took until 500 years ago for Bermuda and other places to be settled by people. So, its geography has been very important to the development of its culture.”

But the culture of Bermuda goes far beyond being a maritime traffic stop. 

Enslaved Africans were brought to the island starting in 1616, just four years after British settlers arrived. Their labor and knowledge would define Bermuda’s growth in ways that rarely get the recognition they deserve. 

“In the first four years, they were getting through quite a lot of the resources on the island,” says Dr. Kristy Warren, a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln in England, whose work focuses on the histories of colonialism and slavery and their legacies within Bermuda. “They realized, ‘We actually can’t do this by ourselves.’”

The story of Bermuda’s people is also the story of how knowledge—agricultural, architectural, spiritual—was carried and preserved across an ocean. And that legacy lives on in the movement of the Gombeys. 

“The history of the Gombeys is, really, the history of the movement of Black people into this portion of the diaspora from Africa,” Gary Phillips, a former director of tourism for the island, shares. As Phillips explains, the masked, costumed dancers form one of Bermuda’s most iconic cultural traditions, rooted in African, Caribbean, and British influences. Once criminalized, the Gombey is now a symbol of celebration and pride. “From the period of suppression to this period of almost celebration, the Gombeys appear almost everywhere,” Phillips adds.

And this is all just a taste. To trace the long arc of Bermuda’s identity—from pigs dropped onshore by passing ships to the critical role of onions—listen to this week’s episode of Lost Cultures: Living Legacies, to unravel it all. It’s available now on  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Player FM, or wherever you get your podcasts.