Nidhe Israel Synagogue Museum

If you decide to visit Bridgetown, the Nidhe Israel Synagogue and Museum is an interesting and rather unexpected stop. Built in 1654 mostly by Sephardic Jews from Brazil (who were fleeing the recently imported Spanish Inquisition), the synagogue is thought to be the oldest in the Western Hemisphere and is still a place of worship today. The adjacent museum, a more recent development, gives the full story of Barbados’s Jewish settlers. One lesser-known piece of information: in the 1600s, Jewish residents, who had learned tropical farming techniques in South America, introduced sugarcane to Barbados—and the crop went on to become the island’s largest (and most famous) source of income for nearly three centuries.