Bradt Barbados Guidebook
Barbados Travel Guide – Advice and expert travel tips, from Bridgetown highlights to beaches, resorts and hotels, culture, wildlife, hiking and local food and drink. Also covering Crop Over Festival, Garrison Historic Area, St Lawrence Gap, St Nicholas Abbey, Bathsheba, Bottom Bay and Flower Forest Botanical Gardens.
Edition: 5
Number of pages: 120
Related products
Bradt Barbados Guide
The latest edition of the Bradt guide to Barbados.
About this guide to Barbados
With a year-round tropical climate and relaxed atmosphere, Barbados is the ideal Caribbean destination for some fun in the sun. This updated Bradt Barbados guidebook, now in its 5th edition, is still the only standalone travel guidebook to this Lesser Antilles island.
This guide offers extensive coverage of famous and lesser-known sights, from the glamorous celebrity-studded Platinum Coast to the wild, untamed remoteness of its Atlantic shoreline. The easternmost island in the Lesser Antilles is English-speaking and has a distinctly British vibe – both colonial legacies. Today the sun-drenched isle is especially popular with Europeans and North Americans.
In-depth advice on accommodation features strongly, from luxury villas and multi-starred retreats to local guesthouses and family-friendly resorts, as do informed perspectives on where and what to eat, from gourmet beachside restaurants to Barbados street food and rum shops, where gossip is shared over a speciality tipple.
Also covered are events that capture the culture, music (notably Caribbean jazz and calypso), food and drink of Bajan life, such as a Friday night ‘lime’ or ‘fish-fry’, plus sports and the much-loved Barbados carnival.
Alongside excelling at toes-in-the-sand relaxation, Barbados richly rewards those who explore by bus, on day tours or by rental car – and doing so is straightforward, inexpensive and safe.
- The wilder east and north coasts are pounded by Atlantic waves: here you will find surfing, intriguing caves, coastal rambles, and charming and colourful villages comprising wooden chattel houses.
- Dotted amidst the sugar-cane fields of the interior are stately plantation houses, pretty botanical gardens and traditional rum distilleries.
- In the sleepy capital of Bridgetown, there’s fine sightseeing around the Garrison Historic Area, in particular.
- You can even venture both underwater and underground – respectively gawping at nocturnal marine life on the Atlantis Submarine Night Tour or taking a tram through limestone caverns at Harrison’s Cave – or trek through the tropical rainforest of Welchman Hall Gully.
So whether you crave white-sand beaches fringed by an emerald-blue sea or duty-free shopping along Broad Street, fancy indulging in vibrant nightlife or clifftop hikes, or visiting traditional villages or local rum distilleries, this updated Bradt Barbados guidebook has got you covered.
Contents
Planning your trip
Bridgetown
Central Bridgetown
Garrison Historic Area
Around Bridgetown
West coast
Bridgetown to Holetown
Holetown
East of Holetown
Speightstown and around
North coast
Along the north coast
Inland from the north coast
East coast
Along the east coast
South coast
The southeast coast
The southwest coast
Listings
Background
Practicalities
About the author and updaters
Originally from the UK, Lizzie Williams has been travelling and writing for more than twenty years. Starting out as an overland and safari tour leader on trips across Africa and the Middle East, she’s now a prolific guidebook author, updater and researcher and has contributed to over 70 guidebook titles for various publishers, the majority of which are on Africa. She has also fallen in love with the Caribbean, and has spent several trips visiting twenty islands.
She is a regular contributor to magazines and websites focused on both African and Caribbean travel. When she’s not on the road, Lizzie lives in Cape Town in South Africa.
Faeze Shad originally hails from northwestern Iran, where she graduated from Tabriz University as a geologist, before working for several years as quality controller for a mining company. She had always dreamed of travelling the world, however, and so relocated to Izmir on the Turkish Aegean coast to read a postgraduate degree in Tourism Management at Yaşar University.
She was editorial researcher for the special centenary edition of Bradt’s South American Handbook published in 2025. Faeze also works for Bradt as a picture researcher for their UK titles.
Daniel Austin is a travel writer, editor and tour leader, who has written a number of Bradt guidebooks over the past couple of decades, and worked on scores of others in an editorial capacity. He was editor of the centenary edition of the South American Handbook.
He first cut his teeth in the travel publishing world on Madagascar authoring multiple guidebooks and a wildlife guide to this exotic island nation. He has since expanded his horizons, and nowadays spends a significant portion of every year at sea, lecturing aboard small expedition cruise ships in various corners of the globe, as well as leading overland tours.