![]() ![]() You’ll find fresh coffee and breakfast pastries to fuel you as you peruse the dozens of tents selling jewelry, woodwork, textiles and even the omnipresent rum punch. This is the place where locals come to sell their wares. Setting out just after sunrise on Saturday, you can drive out to the center of the island, about a half-hour from the coasts, where the Brighton Farmer’s Market unfolds on a bluff overlooking the green fields of a former plantation, starting at 6:30 a.m. Much of the countryside is still devoted to sugar cane: six-foot-tall green and yellow stalks planted so tightly along the sides of the road that they whip the car’s passenger-side rearview mirror as you drive, like the floppy ribbons of a carwash. The ruins of old sugar mills dot the horizon like the water towers of small-town America, identifying the former ownership of the surrounding area. Today, driving the roads of the Barbadian countryside, signs of that past are everywhere. During that time white landowners became extraordinarily rich, thanks to the labor of enslaved people brought over from Africa. The best way to dive into the heart of Barbados is to get up early on a Saturday and head to the interior.ĭuring the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Barbados had a plantation economy driven largely by sugar. She added that it was no coincidence that the move finally occurred amid the Black Lives Matter movement and under the watch of the country’s first female prime minister, Mia Mottley, who is Black.Īnd so today, after three centuries of British rule, change is afoot in Barbados, and the fresh energy is palpable, even to tourists like me. “It doesn’t effect how the country has been governed, but some people think of removing that ceremonial position as the last step in the independence project,” Ms. The act removed the British monarch as the head of state of Barbados - even though it was a ceremonial role. 30, 2021, at the same event where Rihanna was formally named a national hero of the country, Barbados declared itself a republic. For one, there’s the Rihanna affect: The country’s most famous homegrown star, who revealed her second pregnancy while ascending to the heights of Phoenix’s State Farm Stadium during the Super Bowl half time show this year, has given Barbados new visibility and cachet.Īnd on Nov. Now is a particularly fascinating time to visit Barbados. ![]() That’s how you get a real feel for Barbados.” “Get out of the hotel, take the bus, go to the rum shops, go to the fish market. “The prepackaged Barbados is part of Barbados too, but it’s not the way most local people experience the country,” said Kristina Hinds, a professor who heads the department of government, sociology, social work and psychology at the Barbados campus of the University of the West Indies. “When people come to Barbados and they ask what’s the best thing to do, this is the best thing to do,” said Ms. ![]() Denise Alleyne, 39, and Racquel Jordan, 45, two locals who had brought me to the Lizard, encouraged me to try the sea cat - the Barbadian word for octopus - which was served in a basket like French fries and amazingly tender.Īs the yard filled up and some people started dancing, waitresses hauled ice buckets to the wobbly hightops full of young people, who grabbed the ice cubes with tongs and plunked them into glasses half-full of Barbadian Mount Gay rum. Remixed versions of Rihanna songs and reggae bounced across the gravel courtyard as locals streamed in wearing stylish, spend-the-whole-Saturday-out outfits, with brightly patterned shirts and dresses, tilted fedoras and mirrored sunglasses. One sunny Saturday in the middle of the island of Barbados, in the eastern Caribbean, among former sugar cane plantations, I found myself eating fried sea cat in the yard of a rum shop called De Thirsty Lizard in the village of Bridgefield. ![]()
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