Barbados Culture and Heritage: Chattel Houses, Scotland District Walking, the Oldest Americas Synagogue, Sir Garfield Sobers, and Rihanna Brand
The cultural and heritage dimensions of Barbados encompass the portable chattel house architecture of the post-emancipation landscape, the Scotland District highland walks, the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, the supreme cricket legacy of Sir Garfield Sobers, and the billion-dollar Rihanna brand that has made Barbados the most culturally valuable small island in the Caribbean.
- 1
Chattel Houses: The Portable Architecture
The chattel house, the small wooden house built on an unmortared foundation that could be dismantled and moved when the tenant sugar cane worker was required to vacate the plantation-owned land, is the most distinctive and most culturally specific vernacular architecture of Barbados and the material expression of the post-emancipation condition of landless freedom. The surviving chattel house communities of the Barbados parishes are the most eloquent physical testimony to the social history of the island.
- 2
Mount Hillaby: The Barbados Highlands Walk
Mount Hillaby, the highest point in Barbados at 340 meters in the Scotland District, is accessible on a walking circuit from the Welchman Hall Gully that passes through the last significant fragment of the native subtropical vegetation that once covered the Barbadian highlands before the complete conversion to sugar cane. The Scotland District landscape, with its rolling hills and the surviving woodland, is the least touristically developed and most topographically varied part of Barbados.
- 3
Welchman Hall Gully: The Forest Remnant
Welchman Hall Gully, a preserved ravine of the central Barbados highlands with a narrow forest trail through the remnant vegetation including the bearded fig trees that gave the island its name from the Portuguese sailors who described the trees as los barbados the bearded ones, is the most accessible encounter with the native flora of Barbados and the most shaded and cool walking environment on the island.
- 4
Synagogue Lane: The Oldest Jewish Heritage
Nidhe Israel Synagogue on Synagogue Lane in Bridgetown, built in 1654 by Sephardic Jewish merchants who fled Brazil following the Portuguese reconquest from the Dutch, is the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere and the center of the Barbadian Jewish community that played a significant role in the development of the sugar industry and the commercial life of the colonial capital. The adjacent Jewish cemetery contains the oldest Jewish burials in the Americas.
- 5
Cricket Heritage: The Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy
Sir Garfield Sobers, born in Bridgetown in 1936 and universally recognized as the greatest all-round cricketer in the history of the sport, is the most revered figure in Barbadian cultural life, with the knighthood conferred by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 and the Barbados Sports Hall of Fame housing the extensive memorabilia collection of a career that included the world record of six sixes in one over in 1968, a record that stood until 2007. The Kensington Oval Stand named for Sobers is the cathedral of Barbadian cricket.
- 6
Rihanna Cultural Economy: The Brand
The commercial and cultural value of the Rihanna brand to Barbados extends beyond the tourism association to include the Fenty Beauty cosmetics brand that has generated more than a billion dollars in revenue and made Rihanna the wealthiest female musician in the world, the Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, and the ongoing association with the Barbados tourism authority that uses Rihanna's Bajan identity as the primary cultural marketing asset for the island internationally.