Guanahani

Guanahani was a Lucayan island in the Bahamas, remembered as the first landfall of Christopher Columbus on his 1492 voyage across the Atlantic. Its inhabitants belonged to an Arawakan-speaking people who lived throughout the archipelago. Columbus called the island San Salvador, although the precise identity of his landing place remains debated.

The encounter began an upheaval for the Lucayans. Spanish expeditions subsequently carried islanders away to Hispaniola and other colonies as enslaved laborers, while disease and displacement devastated their communities. Within a few decades the Bahamas had lost much of their Indigenous population. Across the archipelago their settlements had depended on fishing, cultivation and travel by canoe between the islands. The name Guanahani preserves a Lucayan place name from the moment when the islands entered European written records.