The UN World Water Development Report 2023 named it among Caribbean countries with extremely high water stress and additionally designated it water scarce, alongside Antigua and Barbuda and St Kitts and Nevis.

There are no real rivers. Water comes from wells in the coral limestone aquifers, and the karst rock acts as a natural filter, which is why the tap water has such a good reputation. A desalination plant at Brighton in St Michael processes brackish water from ten wells and supplies up to about a fifth of the population.

So the reputation is deserved and the supply is finite at the same time. Conserve as a matter of course.

d States. The food import bill was put at upwards of $700 million by the Minister of Agriculture in April 2021, having been reported at around $500 million just a year earlier.

The widely repeated line that Barbados imports 90 per cent of its food is one we could not verify at source, so we are not printing it.

What is grown: sugar cane historically, and West Indian Sea Island cotton, which is the thing worth seeking out. See natural materials below.

nd ground provisions from local farmers, with Fairchild Street Market a second produce market nearby and Oistins trading fish daily.

The Ital tradition is real: the Rastafari Ital Cafe in St Philip, Focus Ital Shop and Vegan Cottage all serve home made plant based Bajan food, and the staples are naturally plant based, cou cou, breadfruit, sweet potato, yam, cassava, eddoes and green banana. The honest caveat is that Barbados still imports a large share of its food, around 22 per cent of merchandise imports, so the markets mix local produce with imported goods rather than being fully local.

PEG Farm and Nature Reserve at Easy Hall is a working regenerative farm on the edge of Hackleton's Cliff, building soil on an island that was cane for four hundred years, with its own farm cafe. Coco Hill Forest is fifty three acres of regenerating land planted as food forest rather than ornamental garden. Walkers Reserve is a former sand quarry being rewilded.

Those are serious projects and none of them is presented to us as certified organic, so we are not going to claim it. What Barbados does have is an unusually strong link between growing and eating: you can eat at the farm you just walked round, which is rarer here than it should be.

Terrestrial protected areas cover 1.1 per cent of the land, down from 1.3 per cent, and marine protected areas record 0.0 per cent of territorial waters in every year from 2018 to 2024.

For scale, that is about one thirty first of the Bahamas' land coverage, and a marine figure that rounds to zero. We could not establish whether that zero reflects a genuine absence of marine protected areas or a reporting gap in the world database, and we would want that resolved before anyone claims otherwise.

It sits oddly against an island whose reefs and turtles are central to its tourism, and it is the single clearest thing Barbados could fix.

It is endemic to Barbados, it is the smallest known snake on earth at around 10 centimetres and 0.6 grams, roughly the width of a strand of spaghetti, and it can curl up on a coin.

It was described as a separate species only in 2008, is listed Critically Endangered, was declared lost to science, and was rediscovered on 20 March 2025 after nearly two decades with no confirmed sighting.

One correction to carry: the Barbados green monkey is an African species that was introduced. It is not endemic and it is not a native biodiversity asset.

West Indian Sea Island cotton is grown here, and you can buy it where it is ginned: Exclusive Cottons of Barbados at Groves in St George runs a ginnery tour with a showroom at the end. The Minister of Agriculture described about a hundred acres prepared with a target of a minimum 500 acres, and a harvest expected between February and March. Carry one uncomfortable figure with it: the fibre sells at around thirty dollars a pound while picking pay is around two or three dollars a pound.

Basketry is alive and the fibres are all island grown. Master weaver Ireka Jelani of Roots and Grasses works khus khus vetiver, rock balsam, pandanus, cabbage palm, wild cane and bread and cheese vine into bags, baskets, hats and tableware, and sells from building 3 at Pelican Craft Centre, open Monday to Saturday nine to six. She frames it as Rastafari self reliance: developing your natural resources sustainably to make a living.

Calabash is the swap and it is nearly gone. It was traditionally a practical vessel for storage and serving food in the home, and the National Cultural Foundation made a three part documentary series precisely because the knowledge now rests with two surviving practitioners, Adrian Compton and Ras Isage Burnette. Clay is steadier: John Springer at Chalky Mount is the fifth generation of his family working the Scotland District's red clay, and visitors can watch and buy.

Importing single use plastic containers and cutlery stopped that day, distributing selling or using them stopped from 1 July 2019, and petro based plastic bags were banned from 1 January 2020. Penalties run to $50,000 or a year's imprisonment, plus $1,000 for each continuing day.

The blot on the record is the south coast sewage crisis. From November 2017 raw sewage surfaced in the Hastings tourism belt, with the collector pipe and the forcemain to the marine outfall failing in several places and diplomatic advisories issued. An emergency outfall was built in late 2018 as a stopgap and Worthing Beach reopened that Christmas Eve, and the government was still describing a new wastewater facility as closing the door on the problem in January 2026.

The Sustainable Barbados Recycling Centre at Vaucluse, formed in 2008 on a 20 year build own operate contract, sits beside the Mangrove landfill it exists to prolong, and states it processes on the order of 1,000 tonnes a day and diverts 60 to 70 per cent from landfill. Read that carefully: most of the diversion is composting, mulch and fuel rather than material recycling, and those are the company's own figures.

On containers, Barbados has had a returnable containers deposit law since the late 1980s, updated in 2019, and in July 2025 launched an Every Bottle Back plastic collection scheme. No official national recycling rate could be verified, so this is a strong landfill diversion operation and a bottle deposit law rather than a full recycling programme.

Crop Over originated in the 1780s to mark the end of the sugar harvest, was ended in the 1940s as the industry declined, and was revived in 1974. The Landship, a uniquely Barbadian institution that parodies naval hierarchy, performs alongside it to the tuk band with Shaggy Bear, Mother Sally and the Steel Donkey.

We could not verify the Landship's founding date, its structure as a friendly society, or whether any company is visitor accessible in a way that pays its members, so we have not claimed it.