Barbados is an island country in the southeastern Caribbean Sea, situated about east of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Roughly triangular in shape, the island measures some from northwest to southeast and about from east to west at its widest point. The capital and largest town is Bridgetown, which is also the main seaport. Barbados was inhabited by its indigenous peoples – Arawaks and Caribs – prior to the European colonization of the Americas in the 16th century. Barbados was briefly claimed by the Spanish who saw the trees with the beard like feature (hence the name Barbados), and then by Portugal from 1532 to 1620. The island was English and later a British colony from 1625 until 1966. From 1966 to 2021, it was a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, modelled on the Westminster system, with Elizabeth II, Queen of Barbados, as head of state. Barbados became a republic on November 30, 2021. History before colonization Some evidence suggests that Barbados may have been settled in the second millennium BC, but this is limited to fragments of conch lip adzes found in association with shells that have been radiocarbon-dated to about 1630 BC. Fully documented Amerindian settlement dates to between about 350 and 650 AD, when the Troumassoid people arrived. The arrivals were a group known as the Saladoid-Barrancoid from the mainland of South America. The second wave of settlers appeared around 800 AD (the Spanish referred to these as "Arawaks") and a third in the mid-13th century. However, the Amerindian settlement surprisingly came to an end in the early 16th century. There's no evidence that the Kalinago (called "Caribs" by the Spanish) ever established a permanent settlement in Barbados, though they often visited the island in their canoes. Colonial history Early colonial history The Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover the island. Portuguese navigator Pedro A. Campos named it Os Barbados (meaning "bearded ones"). Frequent slave-raiding missions by the Spanish Empire in the early 16th century led to a massive decline in the Amerindian population so that by 1541 a Spanish writer claimed they were uninhabited. The Amerindians were either captured for use as slaves by the Spanish or fled to other, more easily defensible mountainous islands nearby. From about 1600 the English, French, and Dutch began to found colonies in the North American mainland and the smaller islands of the West Indies. Although Spanish and Portuguese