Graycliff Heritage Village

Graycliff Heritage Village, in West Street, includes Graycliff Hotel??, with the only five star restaurant in the Bahamas.  It is a stately Georgian colonial style mansion, about 175 years old.  Legend has it that it served as an Officers’ Mess for the West Indian Garrison. The cellars have low and thick walls and bars which may indicate that a garrison was once housed there.  It was once the home of R.H. Sawyer, CMG, who proposed the disestablishment of the Church of England in a resolution to the House of Assembly in 1867.  For a period it was run as a guest house by Mrs Polly Leach and Sir Winston Churchill and his daughter Diana stayed there in 1932.

In recent years it was owned by Dorothy J. Killiam, who sold it to the Earl of Dudley and his wife, the former film actress, Maureen Swanson, in 1966.  In 1975 they sold it to an Italian group who converted it into a small guesthouse and restaurant, the house itself being preserved in its previous state.  The Heritage Village also includes the National Heritage Museum, in Mountbatten House, which traces Bahamian history from the earliest days to the modern era.  Nearby there are the factories making cigars and chocolates.