Back to Barbados

Its high-society heyday may be over, but the Caribbean island once dubbed “little England” has become a much more interesting place to visit

It’s barely 6 p.m. on a Friday night, and already there’s a line forming at Oistins. To the uninitiated, the cheerful outdoor fish fry in this sleepy south coast village might resemble an overflowing beer garden. But since the mid-’90s, the knockabout local institution first popularized by fishermen and wind­surfers has functioned as a tropical Studio 54 of sorts, a riotously diverse melting pot of deep-pocketed voluptuaries and flip-flop-wearing locals and action-seekers. The ruddy man in cargo shorts next to you, waiting for his mahimahi and macaroni pie, is just as likely to be a German tourist from the all-inclusive down the beach as he is the British billionaire Lord Bamford (he of the 204-foot yacht, Sikorsky helicopter, and $25 million Heron Bay estate), who is evidently not above queuing like everybody else to eat din­ner out of a plastic container.

“My grandmother’s house is literally up the street, so I’ve been coming here all my life,” says André Parris, a chatty 25-year-old radio personality, his voice barely audible above the din of steel drums. Parris, it transpires over a Mount Gay or two, is one of the most in-demand DJs in the Caribbean, used to island-hopping with the likes of British Formula One world cham­pion Lewis Hamilton and Barbados’s most notorious international export after rum, Rihanna. But not on Friday nights. “If you are out early and won­dering why everywhere [else] is empty, it’s because they’re all here,” Parris tells me. “It’s a little scrappy, but you always have fun.”

He might as well be referring to Barbados. I started coming to this for­mer British colony in the Lesser Antilles a dozen years (two passports and many rum punches) ago, lured by a vague idea of a gently fading elegance that conjured louche aristocrats and even more disreputable Hollywood celebrities with grand Palladian homes. Of course, by the time I arrived, the island’s heyday had long since passed: when screen legend Claudette Colbert entertained neighbors like Sir Ronald and Marietta Tree (Heron Bay’s original owners) and their friends Bill and Babe Paley at Bellerive, the eighteenth-century plantation house Colbert bought in the early 1960s; and when interior designers Oliver Messel and Happy Ward were the last word in refined tropical glamour. Even the Concorde – which, along with the emergence of the bikini and the closing off of Cuba, arguably put Barbados on the map – was no longer flying in paparazzi bait like Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret. Although its classic hotels such as the lace-latticed Colony Club had seen better days and an influx of nouveau riche Russians and rowdy booze-cruisers had sent discerning jet-set­ters scrambling to the chic enclaves of St. Barts and genteel seclusion of Mustique, I kept coming back. Something about this plucky coral island, which emerged from a seismic dustup on the sea­floor nearly one million years ago and went on to survive colonization, slavery, at least one decimating hurricane, and even McDonald’s (which the locals run out of town in 1996 to protect their beloved homegrown chain Chefette), remained defiantly appealing.

While others chase the next it island, those who stayed – some of whom have been coming back their whole lives – most prize the laid-back civility that still prevails. “It’s so easy and friendly, and now that my kids are grown, everyone always wants to go out and meet people,” says Kit Kemp, the London-based interior designer and co-owner of Firmdale Hotels (includ­ing the new Whitby Hotel in N.Y.C. and the Ham Yard in London), who has spent several weeks a year on the island since 1986 and owns a house on the historic Sandy Lane estate. Regulars are always running into friends at the Sunday market on the polo field at Holders Hill, or over drinks at Scarlet, a trendy west coast bistro bar in a former chattel house on Highway 1. And if you haven’t come with friends, you make them: like the local who, hav­ing seen me stranded with a flat tire, didn’t think twice about driving me home in the opposite direction from where he was headed (and who knew my name the next time I saw him). As my friend Emma Snowdon-Jones, a philanthropist who for years divided her life between Manhattan and a Messel-designed house in St. James, likes to say, “If you want to understand Barbados, sit down with an old-timer outside a rum shop.” At these color­ful local watering holes, it’s not uncommon to find visitors talking cricket and politics with the locals while playing dominoes and downing rum and Cokes with ham cutters. (In a divinely Bajan cultural contradiction, these shops are usually located a mere stumble from one of the island’s many coral Caribbean Gothic churches.)

That’s the main thing about Barbados: It isn’t some cartoonishly beauti­ful fly-and-flop destination but a living island whose history is as present and defining as the white clapboard house-lined streets of, say, Charleston, or the riverside cotton warehouses of Montgomery. Ever since the British settled in 1627 and subjugated the inhabitants and the land in the service of sugarcane, the island’s architecture reflected the ambitions of the Crown; it was the headquarters for the fight against French invaders in the late 1700s, and for more than a century served as the Royal African Company’s slave-trading hub for the entire Americas. This explains why Barbados can sometimes resemble a historical theme park, while also giving a visitor a lot to think about, particularly at a time when issues of racial legacy are dominating conversations at home.

“What sets Barbados apart is its remarkable heritage,” my pal Henry Fraser, a senator in the Barbados Parliament and the island’s unofficial oracle, tells me in the “yawny-drawly” delivery that Coleridge once ascribed to the locals. We’re hav­ing lunch at the Waterfront Cafe, a no-frills joint by the marina in Bridgetown, on the island’s southwest coast, one of the best spots for authentic Bajan food like pepper pot (a potpourri of stewed meat), flying fish, and cou-cou (cornmeal and okra). In Bridgetown alone, he says, you’ll find a pair of neo-Gothic parliament buildings, a 363-year-old synagogue (built by Brazilian Jews fleeing the Portuguese), and Wildey House, a Georgian manse that’s now the headquarters of the Barbados National Trust. The group organizes tours of the sagging former homes of castaway lords and ladies and a former prime minister, the rooms stuffed with musty antiques and curios as well as elegant silverware and china straight out of a Christie’s catalog. In recent years, the stories of these houses have been fleshed out to include the narrative of the slave population, on whose backs the island’s economy was built. “For a while I think we ran the risk of becoming the Caribbean version of Downton Abbey,” quips Miguel Pena, the affable head of the Trust. “You often only heard the story of the white owners. The full story has to be included in all its complexity.”

This story is something that the island had to reckon with in the lead-up to last November’s fiftieth anniversary of independent statehood, which marked cultural and historic milestones back to Barbados’s 1652 treaty with the British {which supposedly inspired a few lines in America’s own Declaration of Independence) and culminated in a guns-blaz- ing concert by Rihanna. The island’s economy, based predominantly on tourism but buffered by trade as well as foreign investment, is relatively robust in spite of the Caribbean’s recent Zika-related woes.

But to glimpse the future of Barbados, you could do no bet­ter than to head to deAction World, a surf shop/café painted in Looney Tunes colors. Owned by Brian Talma, a former pro­fessional surfer who windsurfed for Barbados in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, deAction is located on the south coast – at a safe remove from the island’s hedonic touristic nightmare at St. Lawrence Gap – an area that’s becoming increasingly pop­ular with young locals and travelers who come for the world-class waves. As a result, a few new hotels and boardinghouses have recently opened, bringing considerably more affordable options than on the western Platinum Coast.

“When I opened up here 20 years ago, people thought I was totally mad – it was like the Wild West,” explains Talma, who at 51 still resembles a young beach bum, with his slender surfer body and mop of blond corkscrew hair. “But I kept insisting that the beach culture here is special. What we have now is an organic, healthy way of life that involves the local com­munity – it’s thriving.”

As if on cue, a group of hard-core surfers from Ireland carry­ing boards stop on the beach to ask where the best waves are breaking. While Talma prepares to show an Aussie novice how to paddle out, he responds in his Bajan lilt that “Bathsheba” – an alluringly choppy beach on the rugged Atlantic coast – “is where deaction is.” A young black couple from San Diego ask about the best place to eat nearby. “Chicken Rita’s!” shout a chorus of local surfers sitting in the shade, referring to the leg­endary rum shop where punters patiently wait for the best fried chicken in town. Meanwhile, a well-turned-out older British couple approach, holding hands – a picture of gentility marred only by the Rottweiler they restrain on a tight leash.

As he begins the surfing lesson, Talma tells his pupil not to overthink it, to leave it all out in the water. “Out here,” he tells him, “we’re all the same.”