Holetown

English sailors first claimed Barbados in 1625 after a ship led by John Powell was blown off course on its way from South America to England. On 17 February 1627 his brother, Captain Henry Powell, returned aboard the Olive Blossom with about fifty settlers and ten captive Africans, backed by the merchant Sir William Courteen, and landed here. The settlement was first called St James Town; its later name comes from the stream known as The Hole, which gave the settlers a safe landing place. A monument in the town marks the landing, though it gives the date wrongly as 1605.

Until 1629 this was the island's only town. The first plantations, the first fort, court and governor's house were founded here, and the island's oldest church, St James, was built in 1628. Ships traded with Bristol, London and Boston. When the Earl of Carlisle gained control of the island, his own settlement on Carlisle Bay to the south grew into Bridgetown, and the island's capital moved there.

Today hotels and villas line the shore on either side of the town, part of one long ribbon of building along the coast road. Since 1977 the town has celebrated the first landing every February with the Holetown Festival.

Holetown's identity rests on being the place where English Barbados began. The Holetown Festival, held each February since 1977, marks the arrival of the settlers with a week of parades, dances, street fairs and services at St James Parish Church, whose churchyard is known locally as one of the island's "God's acres", among the oldest consecrated ground in Barbados. The church's original bell, the oldest in Barbados, carries the inscription "God Bless King William 1696".

The town looks both ways: towards the parish life of Saint James, with its church and rum shops, and towards the holiday coast of hotels, villas and beach bars that lines the shore. McGill University's Bellairs Research Institute, a marine biology field station founded in 1954 with a bequest from the British naval commander Carlyon Bellairs, brings students from Canada and other countries for field courses in marine science, geography and development studies. Holetown has been twinned with the London borough of Haringey since 2009.

Holetown is small, and its official boundary covers only the stretch of Highway 1 from the Limegrove shopping centre to Trents Road. Life revolves around tourism: hotels, villas, restaurants, watersports, diving and the shops of the town centre provide much of the local work, alongside banks and services for the surrounding parish.

The coast north and south of the town is one long ribbon of building along the shore road, which carries buses, minibuses and heavy traffic at rush hour between Speightstown and Bridgetown. The busiest months are the dry winter season, when the holiday homes fill; in the wetter months from June the coast is quieter. Highway 2A, the Ronald Mapp Highway, carries much of the island's traffic inland, linking the west coast with the highways that bypass Bridgetown. Small guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts a few blocks inland, around Fitts Village and Risk Road to the south, offer a more local side of the coast than the beachfront.

Holetown eats the same Bajan food as the rest of the island, alongside the international and upmarket restaurants that serve the west coast's visitors. Cou-cou and flying fish is the national dish: a smooth cornmeal-and-okra mash with flying fish, fried or steamed, and a spicy gravy. Fish cakes, macaroni pie, and rice and peas are everyday food, and cutters — sandwiches in a bread roll — are the standard quick lunch.

Roti, a flatbread wrapped around a spiced filling such as chicken, beef or saltfish with potatoes, is sold at small shops such as one at Paynes Bay, and Bajan pepper sauce is on every table. Rum is everywhere, from beach bars to village rum shops, and local drinks include mauby, a bittersweet bark infusion, and sorrel. The town centre has a cluster of restaurants and bars along Highway 1, and Speightstown, further north, has a reasonably priced pub serving local food among its eating places.