Barbados's total land area is about 430 square kilometres (166 square miles), and is primarily low-lying, with some higher regions in the country's interior. Barbados eventually had one of the world's biggest sugar industries after migrant Brazilian Jews introduced the sugarcane to the island in the 1800s. Barbados has a population of about 279,000 and a population growth rate of 0.
Barbados was the administrative headquarters of the Windward Islands until it became a separate colony in 1885. Barbados has diplomatic missions headed by resident ambassadors or high commissioners in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela, and at the European Union (Brussels) and the UN. Barbados has some of the purest water in the world that can be drunk straight from the tap.
Barbados is relatively flat, with highlands in the interior. The constant breeze of the trade winds give Barbados a mild and pleasant tropical climate. You will feel its your home and will want to come back again and again to Barbados: A unique Caribbean paradise, surprisingly sophisticated, friendly, fun and always Naturally Charming. The sugar plantation owners were powerful and successful businessmen who had arrived in Barbados in the early years.
The Island gained full independence in 1966, and maintains ties to the Britain monarch represented in Barbados by the Governor General. Nevertheless, as those poor whites who had or acquired the means to emigrate often did so, and with the increased importation of African slaves, Barbados turned from mainly Celtic in the seventeenth century to overwhelmingly black by the nineteenth century.
From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of the ten members of the West Indies Federation, an organisation doomed by nationalistic attitudes and by the fact that its members, as colonies of Britain, held limited legislative power.
According to the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados, "Bim" was a word commonly used by slaves. During the late 1990s more companies started to become interested in Barbados' offshore sector, until it over took sugar as the new chief money maker. During the Canadian national elections of 2003 and 2006, it was cited that the former Minister of Finance and later Prime Minister Paul Martin had international shipping companies that operated in Barbados' offshore sector under the bilateral treaty possibly saving his company from higher taxes in Canada. Since independence, Barbados has been politically stable.
From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of 10 members of the West Indies Federation, and Sir Grantley Adams served as its first and only prime minister.
