East Coast (Bathsheba)

The east coast is the Barbados that gets cropped out of the holiday brochures. Where the west coast is flat, pale and built up, the windward Atlantic shore around Bathsheba is green, raw and almost empty — open ocean rolling in unbroken against giant mushroom-shaped boulders, with the Scotland District hills rising behind. It is the most photographed scenery on the island and, for a lot of people, the most memorable half day. The one thing to fix in your head before you go: this is a coast you look at, not swim in. The currents are strong and the surf is heavy, which is exactly what makes the Soup Bowl off Bathsheba one of the best reef breaks in the Caribbean and the open sea no place for a casual paddle.

That reframes how you use it. Almost nobody bases on the east coast — there’s little more than a scatter of guesthouses around Bathsheba — so this is a trip out from a west- or south-coast base, about 45 minutes by car over Highway 2 from Holetown or 50 from St Lawrence Gap. Go for late morning, watch the surfers, walk out to the boulders and sit in the shallow Bathsheba tide pools at low tide (the only safe water here), then have grilled fish and a Banks at a village rum shop before heading back to the calm side for an actual swim. With a hire car you can make a full day of it by looping north to Andromeda Botanic Gardens, Cherry Tree Hill and the St Nicholas Abbey rum distillery — the east-coast buses are too sparse to string those together, which is the one place on this small island where renting a car earns its keep.