Things to do
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Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo
Open since 1926 and built around a single tank that reproduces the reef offshore, with a natural history museum and a zoo of island species alongside it. The zoo works on Bermuda's own conservation programmes rather than on charismatic imports.
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Bermuda Railway Trail
Thirty three kilometres of walking and cycling trail laid on the bed of the railway that ran the length of Bermuda from 1931 until it was sold to British Guiana in 1948. It crosses the island away from the roads, on trestles and through cuttings, in seven marked sections.
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Flatts Village
A village built either side of the narrow inlet where Harrington Sound empties into the sea, and the tide runs through the bridge hard enough to be heard. It was a smuggling harbour before it was anything else.
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Devil's Hole
A collapsed cave holding a tidal pool connected to the sea underground, stocked with turtles and reef fish and opened to the public in 1830, which makes it the island's first paying attraction. Visitors fish for the turtles with baitless hooks.
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Harrington Sound
A near enclosed body of salt water in the middle of the island, joined to the sea only through the narrows at Flatts, which keeps it flat when the coast is rough. It is the usual water for kayaking and paddleboarding.
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John Smith's Bay
A south shore beach with a lifeguard in season and a reef close enough in to snorkel from the sand, backed by a park rather than by hotels. It is the local beach of the eastern parishes.
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Shelly Bay Beach
A north shore beach where the water stays shallow a long way out and warms faster than anywhere on the south coast, with a playground and a nature reserve behind it. It is the beach Bermudian families take small children to.
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Spittal Pond Nature Reserve
The largest nature reserve in Bermuda, sixty acres of brackish pond and coastal cliff where most of the island's migrating waterfowl put down between November and March. Spanish Rock, cut with a date of 1543, sits on the cliff at its eastern end.
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Verdmont
An early eighteenth century merchant's house that was never modernised, with no electricity, no plumbing and its original cedar staircase and panelling intact. The National Trust furnished it with Bermudian cedar rather than restoring it.