Barbados: Ten Attractions and Natural Wonders

Two coasts, one small island

Barbados sits slightly apart from the rest of the Caribbean chain, further out into the Atlantic, and it has two very different sides. The west and south coasts, facing the Caribbean, are calm, warm, and lined with beaches and resorts. The east coast, facing the open ocean, is wild — big surf, spray, and cliffs. Inland is rolling former sugar country, coral limestone riddled with caves.

The ten below cover both coasts and the interior. The island is small enough to drive across in an hour, though the narrow lanes make it feel bigger. The dry season, December to May, is the peak; hurricane season is June to November.

1. Bathsheba and the east coast

The east coast is the wild half of Barbados: a long line of Atlantic breakers, rock pools, and undercut boulders left standing on the sand. The village of Bathsheba is its centre, and the reef break just offshore — the "Soup Bowl" — is one of the best surf spots in the Caribbean, hosting an international contest each year.

The water here is dangerous for swimming, but the rock pools at low tide are safe, and the coastal walk and the cliffs of the Scotland District behind make this the scenic drive of the island.

2. Harrison's Cave

Barbados is a cap of coral limestone, and rainwater has hollowed it out. Harrison's Cave, near the middle of the island, is the show cave: a still-forming system of chambers, flowstone, stalactites, streams, and pools, which you tour on a small electric tram that trundles down into the earth. Guided walking and "eco-adventure" tours go deeper.

The surrounding Welchman Hall Gully — a collapsed cave now grown up as a lush ravine of mahogany and green monkeys — makes a good pairing.

3. St Nicholas Abbey

Built around 1658, St Nicholas Abbey (never actually an abbey) is one of only a handful of Jacobean great houses left in the Americas — curved Dutch gables, finials, a working plantation around it. The estate still grows sugar cane and distils a well-regarded rum on site; the tour takes in the house, the mill, the steam-powered mill house, and a heritage railway up to a clifftop viewpoint.

Like every plantation site on the island, its history is bound up with slavery, which the current owners address directly in the visit.

4. The Animal Flower Cave

At the northern tip of the island, this sea cave is named for the sea anemones ("animal flowers") in its pools. You climb down into a chamber where the openings frame the ocean and the swell surges below; when conditions are calm you can get into the natural pools inside. Whales and turtles are sometimes seen from the clifftop restaurant above.

The North Point cliffs around it, battered by the Atlantic, are dramatic in any weather.

5. Historic Bridgetown and the Garrison

Bridgetown, the capital, has a compact colonial core: the Parliament buildings and their neo-Gothic clock tower, the Careenage inlet full of boats, and National Heroes Square. Just south, the Garrison — the old British military headquarters for the eastern Caribbean — surrounds a savannah that is now a racetrack, ringed by Georgian barracks, an arsenal, and the Barbados Museum in the former military prison. The whole ensemble is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

George Washington stayed in Bridgetown in 1751, his only trip outside what became the United States; the house is a museum.

6. Hunte's Gardens

In the centre of the island, the horticulturist Anthony Hunte planted a theatrical garden inside a deep, circular sinkhole — a former cave whose roof fell in. Paths spiral down through layers of palms, ferns, orchids, and bromeliads, with classical music playing and chairs set out among the greenery; Hunte himself, until his recent death, was often on hand with a rum punch.

It is small — an hour's visit — and widely rated the loveliest garden on an island full of them.

7. Crane Beach and the south coast

Crane Beach, on the quieter southeast coast, is a wide strip of pink-white sand below cliffs, with enough Atlantic swell for bodysurfing but a reef that keeps it manageable. The Victorian-era Crane hotel above it was one of the first resorts in the Caribbean.

The rest of the south coast — Silver Sands, Miami Beach, Accra — is the island's liveliest, and Friday night at the Oistins fish fry, where the fishing town grills the day's catch to loud music, is a Barbadian institution.

8. Carlisle Bay

Right beside Bridgetown, Carlisle Bay is a broad, calm, shallow bay that doubles as a marine park: half a dozen shipwrecks lie in shallow water within swimming distance of the beach, colonised by fish and turtles, and green turtles feed on the grass beds close to shore. It is the easiest snorkelling on the island, and catamaran day-trips anchor here to swim with the turtles.

The beach itself (Pebbles, Brownes) is busy, central, and free.

9. Farley Hill and the north

Farley Hill was one of the grandest plantation houses on the island, host to royalty in its day; gutted by fire in 1965, its stone shell now stands in a mahogany-shaded national park with a view over the wild Scotland District to the Atlantic. It is a popular picnic and wedding spot.

Nearby are the Barbados Wildlife Reserve (green monkeys, tortoises, an aviary) and the last working sugar windmill on the island at Morgan Lewis.

10. The west coast beaches

The west coast — the "Platinum Coast" — faces the Caribbean and is where the calm water and the smart hotels are: Paynes Bay, Mullins, and the string of beaches around Holetown, where the first English settlers landed in 1627. The swimming is easy, the sunsets face straight out to sea, and turtles are common just offshore.

Holetown and Speightstown, the old northern port, both keep some of their small colonial-town character behind the resorts.

Barbados is compact and friendly, with good roads (once you get used to the left- hand drive and the narrow lanes) and enough variety — two coasts, caves, gardens, history — to fill a week without repeating yourself.