view of ships in Nassau from Fort Fincastle
Our 11-day cruise on MSC Meraviglia made two port stops in Nassau. On the first round I had a chocolate-making tour while John went to a wine-mixing tour, both at Graycliff Hotel. The second time around we first walked to Fort Fincastle and the Queen’s Staircase, then from there to Ardastra Garden & Wildlife Conservation Centre.
pink flower
Ardastra Gardens was established in 1937 by Jamaican horticulturalist Hedley Edwards. He chose the name from the Latin words ardua ad astra, which means striving towards the stars. It was first developed as an exotic garden and nature preserve, with endangered Caribbean flamingos from the island of Inagua added in the 1950’s. With a successful breeding program, the garden became a permanent home for its flamingos. Eventually they began to train them to entertain visitors. Inagua is the southernmost island in the Bahamas, made up of a pair of islands called Great Inagua and Little Inagua, or collectively Inagua. Little Inagua is an uninhabited protected turtle habitat and Great Inagua is home to the Morton Salt factory. Inagua is popular for ecotourism and flamingo sanctuaries. In 1980 native Bahamian Norman Solomon purchased Ardastra gardens and added more animals and the garden became a conservation center and boutique zoo.
flower at Ardastra Garden
Ardastra Gardens & Wildlife Centre is about a 3 kilometer walk from the cruise port, which google maps pegs as just over 30 minutes and a slightly shorter distance because its directions start where the port ends rather than out on the dock. It was about the same distance from where we started at Fort Fincastle, but a different route. Google maps said we had arrived at the corner of a street next to the humane society where there was just a sign for the garden & wildlife center with an arrow pointing down a nearby dead-end road. The actual entrance was about a block away at the end of that dead-end road.
turtles
Looking up things to do in Nassau before our cruise, I found Ardastra Garden, with info saying that admission was free. I’m not sure if they were dead wrong or just way out of date, but it actually cost $20 to get in. It’s a fairly small place at around 4 acres and the gardens seemed to be mainly plantings between animal enclosures rather than any specific garden areas. The price is kind of high for the size of the attraction, but if you consider it as a donation to the wildlife center then it’s not bad since it runs partly on donations.
flowers at Ardastra Garden
The site that said Ardastra was free may have been confusing this garden with the nearby Nassau Botanical Garden although online info says there is a small fee to enter that one as well. When we walked past what was probably a back entrance to that garden on the way to Ardastra there was an open gate with a small sign that just said Botanical Garden going into a forested area so someone could have gone in there and thought it was free – and that they were at Ardastra since it is nearby. The Nassau Botanical Garden opened on July 10, 1973 when the Bahamas first gained their independence from British rule. It features 18 acres of tropical flora covering over 600 species, including the Bahamas national flower, the Yellow Elder. That garden is in a former rock quarry that supplied stones for building roads and Fort Charlotte, which the garden sits behind.
parrot
The first creatures we saw after entering Ardastra were parrots on stands. They weren’t caged, but stayed on their perches and didn’t fly away. I don’t know if they couldn’t fly or just didn’t want to. They do take in injured animals there so some or all of the birds may have recovered from injuries that left them flightless. One of the aquatic birds in a pond had an obviously injured wing. Over 75% of the animals there are rescue or rehab animals. The flamingos are the national bird of the Bahamas and part of a breeding program for threatened species.
white peacock
A white peacock ran around loose and uncaged while a regular blue and green colored peacock was in a cage with a flock of peahens. There were some caged birds including a toucan, parakeets, and a barn owl. Chickens ran free in some places and were caged in others. One little area had other farm animals besides the chickens with several pigs, some goats, and a few rabbits. Most of the rabbits were in cages, but one was running around loose.
goose, probably male
There were a couple geese by a pond, probably a male and a female as the larger one had all sorts of things sticking out around his head that the smaller one did not.
capybara
One enclosure held a capybara, the world’s largest rodent. Capybaras are native to central and south America and live in swampy grasslands near water. They can stay underwater for up to 5 minutes, have webbed feet, and eat mainly water plants and grass.
serval cat
Another had a couple Serval cats, which sort of looked like a cross between a giraffe and a cheetah with their excessively long necks. These cats are native to Africa, can run over 50mph, jump up to 10 feet high or 20 feet in distance and have enormous ears for the size of their heads.
Let me out!
They also had some other random animals like raccoons. While some do live in the Bahamas, they are not a native animal there.
Caribbean flamingos
At Ardastra flamingos are the stars of the show, literally. One flock was loose in the park, but stayed in a little grassy area next to a small arena. Another flock was in an enclosure. The loose ones performed in a flamingo show where they moved together as a group under the commands of a human drill sergeant. The talk accompanying the show said they were trained for that using their normal behavior patterns. Flamingos in the wild tend to hang out in cliques with quieter birds staying among other quiet birds while the noisy ones hang together with each other.
performing with the flamingos
During the show the trainer picked a couple people to come in one by one and pose with the flamingos. He picked me first and asked me to stand like a flamingo. Since they are famous for standing on one foot that’s what I did. It’s not like I could become all pink and feathery or anything. The other girl that came in after looked like she was posing for phone selfies rather than doing anything flamingo-like, but I guess that worked for her. She probably doesn’t look nearly so awkward as me in her photos anyway.
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