Bridgetown

Bridgetown

The capital and largest city of Barbados is Bridgetown. Previously The Town of Saint Michael, Greater Bridgetown is situated within the parish of Saint Michael. The present site of the town was founded by English settlers in 1628. Bridgetown is an important tourist destination in the West Indies and serves as an important financial, information technology, convention center and cruise ship port for the Caribbean. On 25 June 2011, Historic Bridgetown and its Garrison was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although the island was deserted or uninhabited when the British arrived, one of the few signs of the island's indigenous inhabitants' previous existence was a primitive bridge built on the marshes of the Careenage area in the center of Bridgetown. It was believed that this bridge was built by the Tainos, a people indigenous to the Caribbean. After the structure was found, British settlers began to call the area of present-day Bridgetown the Indian Bridge. It is widely believed by scholars that the Taino were driven from Barbados to the neighboring island of Saint Lucia by the Kalinagos, another native people from the region. Eventually, after 1654, when the British built a new bridge over the Careenage, the area was known as The Town of Saint Michael, and later as Bridgetown. The Bridgetown Port is the main port of call for cruise ships and cargo vessels in Barbados. The Deep Water Harbor is located across Carlisle Bay, northwest of the Careenage Channel. Nowadays, Bridgetown is a thoroughly modern and thriving city with a wide range of modern facilities. The city is also home to an impressive conference center, the Sherbourne Conference Centre.