Experience Trinidad & Tobago's heritage

The lively and placid contrasts of Trinidad and Tobago will both be infused with a rambunctious energy for its history, come July.

Between July and August every year, the Tobago Heritage Festival brings the people of the two islands together to celebrate their cultural history in an explosion of parades, performances, music, food and dance.

The productions of the festival are the result of hours of work of the Tobagonian villages, and the main focus tends to be on Tobago's ancestral heritage, and its natural heritage.

Tobago's natural beauty is celebrated by villages, which display the various plants and materials unique to their area. The festival also allows visitors to learn about the applications that these materials would have had in years gone by.

The 14-day event also celebrates the islands' ancestral heritage, with rituals of the Aboriginal, African and European carried out.

For example, in the village of Buccoo, a caricatured pastiche of the days of yore on Tobago gives the audience an entertaining history lesson, casting an eye over the island's colonial past, when natives worked on the plantations.

One of Tobago's favourite year-round activities, goat racing, is turned into a major event at the festival. The event itself does not involve riding goats as such, but actually sees jockeys racing against the goats, in a bizarre two-legged versus four-legged encounter.

Sadly for any cloven-hooved losers, they will be turned into a feast of curry after the race, when locals and holidaymakers party late into the night. XXX