Crop Over Festival 2023 in Barbados

Crop Over Festival is a 200-year-old Bajan tradition dedicated to the end of the sugar cane harvest season. Dating back to 1687, the festival features singing, dancing, and music made with water-filled bottles, banjo, triangle, fiddle, guitar, bones, shak-shak, and other traditional instruments. During the festival, attendees compete in climbing a greased pole and drinking and consuming various foods. The few-month celebration begins in early summer in May or June and runs until the first Monday of August, culminating with The Grand Kadooment.

Grand Kadooment celebration features a large parade when Masquerade Bands march to Spring Garden Highway dressed in colourful sequin costumes and feathers. Vibrant dancing behind music trucks makes it the most joyous day of the year. Grand Kadooment is the largest and most colourful celebration of Barbados.

Another Crop Over feature is calypso competitions. Calypso music with syncopated rhythm and socially-charged lyrics mocks local politics and governments. Musicians are competing for the Calypso Monarch Award as well as in People's Monarch, and Party Monarch competitions held on the Ermy Bourne Highway, East Coast. There are also craft markets, vendors, and stalls selling foods and crafts, cavalcades and street parties breaking out almost every day. Pic-o-de-Crop Show can be seen every evening before the King of Calypso is finally selected.