Barbados

Everyone arrives in Barbados for the water.

And the water keeps its promise — turquoise, warm, the color of a pool that forgot where it ended. But give the island a few days and it starts handing you the rest of itself. Coral forts with their cannons still aimed at the sea. A great house standing roofless on its cliff. Green monkeys watching from the branches. And rum — always rum — because this is the island that invented it, and it has never once let you forget.

We came for a birthday and a beach. We left having climbed to a lion carved from a single block of coral, wandered a reserve where the tortoises have right of way, and stood in the house where a young George Washington once stayed — the only time in his life he ever left North America. Barbados is small. It's also older and stranger than the brochures let on.

This is our collection of Barbados — the forts, the rum, the ruins, and everything in between.