Barbados Is an Island That’s Filled With Cool Things to Do Right Now, From Mangrove Boardwalks to Rum Beach Clubs to Fish Cakes
Barbados has quietly become the most interesting island in the Eastern Caribbean to spend a week of daytime hours. Its newest attraction is a wetland that spent nearly two decades closed to the public, and its most talked-about rum experience comes with a private stretch of sand attached.
There is a reason the island keeps landing on best-of lists having nothing to do with hotels. Barbados is stacking up things to actually do — mangrove boardwalks, distillery decks, underground caverns, open-air food gardens and roadside fish cake tents that have become destinations in their own right.
Airlift into Grantley Adams International Airport remains strong through the winter season, and the island’s attraction roster has expanded faster than almost anywhere else in the region. The result is a destination rewarding anyone willing to rent a car and leave the beach behind for a few hours.
Here are 12 experiences to build into your next Barbados vacation.
Graeme Hall Nature Sanctuary
Start at the Graeme Hall Nature Sanctuary on the south coast in Worthing, Christ Church, the single best new reason to visit the island. The 35-acre property is the last significant mangrove wetland in Barbados and the country’s only Ramsar-designated wetland of international importance.
The sanctuary spent years shuttered before reopening, and it now offers a mile-long boardwalk through red and white mangroves, a Gully Aviary filled with macaws and parrots, and guided lake tours aboard a boat called the Mangrove Princess.
A new elevated walkway, the Richard Carter Mangrove Boardwalk, will add 1,300 feet of trails and viewing platforms inside the mangrove forest itself.
Herons, egrets, ospreys and the Caribbean coot all turn up here on a stop along the Atlantic Flyway. Most visits run 90 minutes to two hours, and a visitor day pass costs $40 for adults.
“What we have seen since our reopening has exceeded every expectation,” said Anthony Da Silva of the Barbados Wetlands Trust.
