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Barbados

Caribbean

The easternmost island of the Caribbean, a coral-limestone island standing alone in the Atlantic beyond the Lesser Antilles arc. The calm, reef-lined west and south coasts front Bridgetown, the UNESCO-listed capital, while the wild Atlantic east coast breaks over the boulders of Bathsheba and the Soup Bowl. The birthplace of rum and an independent nation with a British and Bajan culture, the island runs on beaches, diving, surfing, cricket and a summer season of Crop Over.

6 activities · 6 pairings · 9 verified providers

What you can do in Barbados

Culinary / Cooking

Bridgetownyear-roundBajan food is a Caribbean cuisine of its own, and a walking food tour of Bridgetown is the fastest way into it. The national dish is cou-cou and flying fish, cornmeal and okra under a gravy of the small silver fish that once shoaled around the island, and the everyday classics run from the fish cutter, a fried-fish sandwich in a salt-bread roll, to macaroni pie, pudding and souse, and rum-shop plates washed down with a local beer. The historic capital, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, hides its best eating in market stalls, old rum shops and hole-in-the-wall kitchens that a guide can open up, sampling as you walk the colonial streets and the Careenage. The island's other great food ritual is the Friday-night fish fry at Oistins on the south coast, where vendors grill marlin, tuna and flying fish under the lights beside a lime of music and dominoes. A guided tour turns a plate of flying fish into the story of the island.

Music & Culture Festivals

Crop OverBridgetownJul AugCrop Over is Barbados's national festival and one of the great carnivals of the Caribbean, and Bridgetown is its stage. It began in the 1600s as the celebration that marked the end of the sugar-cane harvest, faded with the decline of the plantations, and was revived in 1974 into a summer-long season of Bajan music, art and masquerade. The calendar builds from late June through July with calypso and soca competitions, the Pic-O-De-Crop monarch finals and the Cohobblopot show, then peaks in early August. It opens with Foreday Morning, a pre-dawn street jump where crowds cover themselves in paint and mud behind the music trucks, and climaxes on Grand Kadooment Day, when costumed bands parade from the National Stadium through the streets and finish on Spring Garden Highway. The National Cultural Foundation frames Crop Over as the meeting of the island's British and West African heritage, and Rihanna, a Bajan, has returned to play mas in her home carnival. You can watch from the roadside or register with a band and cross the road in costume yourself.

Sailing

Carlisle BayJan Feb Mar Apr May Jun DecA catamaran cruise along the calm Caribbean coast is the classic Barbados day on the water, and most sail out of Bridgetown to anchor over the turtles and wrecks of Carlisle Bay. The sheltered south-west and west coast has flat, clear water and steady trade winds, so the big sailing cats run gentle three-stop cruises: one stop to swim with green and hawksbill turtles on the seagrass, one to snorkel the shipwrecks in the bay, and a reef or beach stop with lunch and drinks aboard. It is sailing as a relaxed cruise rather than a hands-on lesson, though the crews will let you take the helm and trim a sail on the downwind legs. For serious sailors, Barbados is also a bluewater landfall, the first island many transatlantic crews reach, and the Mount Gay Round Barbados Race Series each January circles the whole island in one of the Caribbean's classic offshore races.

Scuba Diving

Carlisle BayJan Feb Mar Apr May Nov DecCarlisle Bay packs the best easy diving in Barbados into one calm, shallow marine park on the edge of Bridgetown. Six shipwrecks lie in the sand less than 200 metres from the beach, from the Berwyn, a 1919 tugboat now furred with coral, to the Bajan Queen, a former harbour cruise vessel sunk in 2002, all sitting between about 5 and 18 metres and reachable on a single dive. The wrecks act as artificial reefs, thick with sergeant majors, moray eels, seahorses, frogfish and the occasional octopus, and green and hawksbill turtles cruise through on their way to the seagrass beds. Because everything is shallow and protected from swell, this is an ideal place to learn to dive or to log a relaxed wreck-and-turtle dive with high visibility. Beyond the bay, the west-coast reefs and deeper wrecks like the freighter Stavronikita give certified divers more to explore.

Surfing

BathshebaJan Feb Mar Nov DecThe Soup Bowl at Bathsheba is the best-known wave in the Caribbean and the reason surfers fly to Barbados. It is a fast, powerful reef break that peels over a shallow coral shelf on the Atlantic east coast, throwing a hollow right-hander that holds size right through the winter swell season. Kelly Slater has called it one of his favourite waves anywhere, and the pros who pass through rate it for its consistency and the barrel section on the inside. This is an advanced wave over sharp reef, so most schools start beginners on the gentler south-coast breaks at Freights Bay and Surfer's Point, then guide stronger surfers out to the Soup Bowl when the conditions line up. The swell runs cleanest from November to March, when North Atlantic storms push groundswell onto the reef, and the boulder-strewn beach and the clifftop Round House make it as good to watch as to ride. Riding a clean one here is a rite of passage for any travelling surfer.

Wine / Spirits Education

Bridgetownyear-roundBarbados is the birthplace of rum, and a tasting at the Mount Gay visitor centre in Bridgetown is the way to understand why. Rum was first distilled on the island's sugar estates in the 1600s, and Mount Gay traces a deed to 1703, which makes it the oldest continuously running rum brand in the world. The open-air visitor centre in the capital walks you through the process, from molasses and the island's coral-filtered water to the double distillation and oak ageing that give Barbadian rum its style, and pairs it with a guided tasting of the signature blends. You can go deeper with a cocktail workshop or a lunch-and-rum pairing, and the full historic distillery tour runs at the working site in the northern parish of Saint Lucy. Barbados also has a distinct rum-shop culture, with hundreds of small bars across the island where rum is the social glue, so a session at the visitor centre is a structured start to a much wider drinking history.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Music Festivals
Sailing
Scuba Diving
Surfing
Wine & Spirits

Upcoming events in Barbados