Barbados’ Crop Over – Sweetest Summer Festival
After two years of social distancing and lockdowns, Crop Over returns
Updated April 2022
Beyond your imagination lives the Sweetest Summer Festival. It’s more than just a Caribbean carnival. Crop Over is a three-month-long fiesta, climaxing with a mega-market of food, booze, art, music, and J’ouvert, also known as fore day morning. Bridgetown Market becomes party central.
Barbados: joy, bacchanal, abandonment
Endorsed as the “Sweetest Summer Festival‘ by revelers from around the world and across Barbados, Crop Over epitomises fun, joy, bacchanal, and sheer abandon. Fashioned against the scenery of friendly people, hypnotizing blue waters, and sandy beaches, Barbados Crop Over is the perfect Caribbean destination to recapture your joie de vivre. Barbados itself is a must-visit, all-year-round destination, and is especially popular during the summer months.
Between June and August, Crop Over is a Bajan cultural fest with an extravaganza of over thirty events and activities ascending to the Grand Kadooment, a masquerade packed with food, colour, and revelry. Rooted in Barbados’ rich culture and heritage, Crop Over harkens back to an age when sugar cane was “King: in the Caribbean. The earliest accounts from 1798 recorded the Harvest Home Festival celebrated the end of the sugar harvest with slaves and planters celebrating in song, dance, and merriment. Today, Crop Over celebrates the tradition of signaling the end of the sugar cane harvest in a national display of cultural heritage, creativity, and spectacle. These historic celebrations have evolved into the Sweetest Summer Festival.
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Capturing everything ‘Barbadiana’
The Opening Gala and Ceremonial Delivery of the Last Canes, signaling the official start of the festivities is a uniquely Barbadian cultural event, peppered with historical references and mixed with modern-day entertainment. This is a must-see for visitors looking to capture a one-stop-shop experience of everything ‘Barbadiana’. At this event, in the presence of dignitaries and throngs of patrons, national homage is paid to symbols of the Festival’s Heritage – those plantation workers who harvest the most sugar canes for the season, with the ultimate crowning of the “King and Queen of the Crop“.
Nowhere else in the world can you find pan fused with jazz and tuk band rhythms on a hillside picnic; or Pan Under the Stars on the water’s edge of one of the oldest historic colonial cities; or the great Caribbean Pan showdown set against two miles of white sand and crystal blue water. To do this you must experience the Sweetest Summer Festival in Barbados. And, after two years of lockdowns and social distancing, the people of Barbados welcome back visitors to their shores, and Crop Over 2022, which climaxes between 27 July and 2 August 2022, is a perfect time to visit.
Of course, party enthusiasts are offered the ultimate carousing experience with events like Soca Royale and Cohobblopot. Soca Royale packs a powerful double punch featuring the Sweet Soca and Party Monarch Competitions.
Meanwhile, the premier international event, Cohobblopot is the ultimate showcase of the Season’s monarchs, popular artistes both local and international, and soca hits.
Festival fever’ seizes the senses: Something for Everyone!
But!… to this London boy from the Caribbean, returning home to the Sweetness of Crop Over can only be described as a sensation that the palate and spine must savour in unison. It is a tingle echoing in the eardrum that sends a sweet vibration down to the spine, which unleashes a festival fever that seizes the senses. It signals the time to remove the tension locking my body in an upright position for months. It is a time of true abandonment allowing the spirit of the festival to take over my soul. And so, finding myself humming a hot soca tune, partying non-stop for 24 hours, making new friends from across the world, and enjoying the magnificent food topped off with the world’s oldest and finest rums is a common outcome during Crop Over.
As the Sweetest Summer Festival, Crop Over offers something for everyone, be it artists celebrating diverse art and crafts in the Visual Arts & Crafts Festival or the ever-popular Poetry Slam event READ-IN! The Festival is more than a carnival. Climaxing with one mega-market of food, art, and music, Barbadian J’ouvert known as Foreday morning, Bridgetown Market becomes party central on the final weekend of Crop Over. And of course, Grand Kadooment is the icing on the cake with thousand upon thousands masquerading in a 4-mile-long sea of colour, topped off with soca music that is as sweet as cane sugar. Grand Kadooment spectacle is a magical event that tops off what is known simply as Crop Over…the Sweetest Summer Festival!
