Barbados

Barbados sits alone in the Atlantic, east of the volcanic arc that encloses the Caribbean Sea, and unlike those islands it is built mostly of coral limestone. Rain soaking through that porous rock carved Harrison’s Cave, a gallery of stalactites and clear pools. The west coast faces calm water; the east takes the full Atlantic swell, which breaks on giant boulders at Bathsheba, in the Scotland District, where the coral cap has worn away.

Amerindians had lived here, but the island was empty when English settlers landed at Holetown in 1627. Within two decades sugar, cut by enslaved Africans, had made it one of England’s richest colonies, and its slave code of 1661 was copied in Jamaica and the Carolinas. George Washington spent several weeks here in 1751, his only voyage abroad. Bussa rose against slavery in 1816. Errol Barrow led Barbados to independence in November 1966, and in November 2021 it became a republic within the Commonwealth.

Crop Over began as the feast that closed the cane harvest and ends with Grand Kadooment, a day of costume bands and soca. Frank Worrell, Everton Weekes, Clyde Walcott and Garfield Sobers learned their cricket here. Cou-cou, a cornmeal and okra mash, comes with steamed flying fish, and George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin grew out of village life. Hotels, offshore finance and international business carry the economy, and the cane survives in rum from distilleries such as Mount Gay.