Luxury hotel holidays to Barbados

Highlights of Barbados

Local cuisine including Fish dishes such as flying fish, dolphin fish and kingfish. Banks beer and Mountgay rum. Barbados has numerous restaurants of a very high quality, many of them along the west coast, including the Cliff and Carambola. Mullins beach bar south of Speightstown. Bathsheba and the east coast with its miles of sandy beaches and ocean surf. Barclays Park beach and beach bar on the east coast north of Bathsheba. The brilliance of the orange-red flamboyant trees in summer and the dark red of the poinsettias in winter. Fruit stalls for pineapples, coconuts and bananas by the road side. Local cricket matches on pitches surrounded by palm tree-clad hills. Deep sided lanes between the sugar cane fields with glimpses of gracious plantation houses here and there. Wooden houses of shocking pinks, mauves, blues and yellows. ‘British’ post boxes, road signs and bus stops. Plenty of sports available to play and watch; golf, horseracing, cricket, riding, polo, walking, tennis. Early in the morning it`s as if the whole nation is out jogging. Cropover festival in August.

Cultural highlights of Barbados

For short distances or dining out, use a taxi. It’s well worth hiring a car for most or at least part of your stay to have flexibility and independence. The quality of the roads is fine, bar a few potholes in the country and confusing road signs (be prepared to get lost, keep your petrol tank topped up and just keep asking the way). Barbados is very well developed for places of interest and well-preserved houses, plantations, mills, gardens and parks. For architectural interest visit St Nicholas Abbey, Drax Hall and Francia. For exotic gardens visit Andromeda and the Flower Forest. If you want to get away slightly from the main tourist areas travel into Scotland north of Speightstown. A drive across the interior provides beautiful scenery, with valleys and gullies and ridges, acres of sugar cane fields and the grey-green leaves of palm trees rustling in the breeze.