Sights in Jamaica
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Dunn's River Falls
Widely held to be one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world, these famous falls, on the A3, 3km west of town, are Jamaica’s top-grossing tourist attraction. As long as you’re not expecting a peaceful communion with nature, a morning here can be an enjoyable and invigorating experience. Join hands in a daisy chain at the bottom and clamber up the tiers of limestone that stairstep 180m down to the beach in a series of cascades and pools. The water is refreshingly cool and the falls are shaded by a tall rain forest and a number of magnificent tree specimens. Today, the place seems more like a man-made theme park than a natural wonder. The St Ann Development Company…
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Puerto Seco Beach
The eastern side of the bay is rimmed with white-sand beaches. With its soft sand and limpid waters, Puerto Seco Beach, in the center of town, is a real charmer. Open to the public, it sports rustic eateries and bars and a fun park with a waterslide for kids not interested in sun-tanning. On weekends and holidays the beach is teeming, but during the week the place is often deserted. You can rent fishing boats, sea bikes and jet skis.
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Devon House
This restored home nestles in landscaped grounds on the northwest side of Hope Rd at its junction with Waterloo Rd. A beautiful ochre-and-white house, it was built in 1881 by George Stiebel, a Jamaican wheelwright who hit paydirt in the gold mines of Venezuela. The millionaire rose to become the first black custos of St Andrew. The government bought and restored the building in 1967 to house the National Gallery of Jamaica, which has since moved to its present location downtown. Antique lovers will enjoy the visit, whose highlights include some very ornate porcelain chandeliers. Note the trompe l’oeil of palms in the entrance foyer. Stiebel even incorporated a game room…
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Emancipation Park
This wide open space, carved from the dense urban jungle, has a jogging track, stately fountains and, winningly, reggae music emanating from tiny speakers hidden in the grass. It’s a grand place for a promenade, particularly at sunset when the walkways fill with cheerful Kingstonians just liberated from their workplaces. A controversial focal point is the US$4.5 million statue Redemption Song, by Laura Facey Cooper. Depicting a couple of nude, 3m-tall slaves gazing to the heavens, the epic work sometimes elicits prurient comments by passersby due to certain larger-than-life physical attributes of the figures.
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Turtle River Park
Near Island Village on Main St, this welcome new green space in the middle of downtown represents a positive new trend in Jamaica’s approach to urban development. The lushly gardened park with manicured lawns also provides a zone free from the hustle of the main drag.
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Turtle Beach
The main beach of Ocho Rios is the long crescent of Turtle Beach, stretching east from the Turtle Towers condominiums to the Renaissance Jamaica Grande Resort. There are changing rooms, and palms for shade.
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Island Village Beach
Island Village Beach, located at the west end of Main St, is a peaceful, small beach that offers lockers (US$5), towels (US$5) and beach chairs and umbrellas (US$5 apiece).
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National Gallery of Jamaica
The superlative collection of Jamaican art housed by the National Gallery is quite simply the finest on the island and should on no account be missed. In addition to offering an intrinsically Jamaican take on international artistic trends, the collection attests to the vitality of the country’s artistic heritage as well as its present. The core of the permanent collection is presented on the 1st floor in 10 galleries representing the Jamaican School, organized chronologically spanning the years 1922 to the present. The first rooms are mainly devoted to the sculptures of Edna Manley and the spectacularly vibrant ‘intuitive’ paintings, notably the dark landscapes of John…
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Cinchona Gardens
The cultivation of Assam tea and cinchona (whose quinine – extracted from the bark – was used to fight malaria) led to the founding of Cinchona in 1868. The grounds were later turned into a garden to supply Kingston with flowers. In 1903 the Jamaican government leased Cinchona to the New York Botanical Gardens and, later, to the Smithsonian Institute. Today, the gardens are a little run down, but it’s really the fabulous views that lure you up the 1370m. To the north stand the peaks, but you can also peer down into the valleys of the Clyde, Green and Yallahs Rivers. A dilapidated old house full of weathered antiques sits atop the 2.5-hectare gardens, fronted by lawns…
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Bob Marley Museum
For many, Jamaica means reggae, and reggae means Bob Marley. If this sounds like you, a visit to Kingston definitely means a visit to the reggae superstar’s former home and studio. The creaky wooden house on Hope Rd where Marley once lived and recorded is the city’s most-visited site. Today the house functions as a tourist attraction, museum and shrine, but much remains as it was during Marley’s day. The house is guarded by a sentry of faithful Rasta brethren and sisters and shielded by a vibrantly painted wall festooned with Rastafarian murals. Dominating the forecourt is a gaily colored statue of the musical legend. Some of the guides are overly solemn (focusing with…
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Firefly
Set amid wide lawns high atop a hill 5km east of Oracabessa and 5km west of Port Maria, Firefly was the home of Sir Noel Coward, the English playwright, songwriter, actor and wit. When he died in 1973, Coward left the estate to his partner Graham Payn, who gifted it to the nation. Today the house is a museum, looking just as it did on Sunday, February 28, 1965, the day the Queen Mother visited. Your guide will lead you to Coward’s art studio, where he was schooled in oil painting by Winston Churchill. The studio displays Coward’s original paintings and photographs of himself and a coterie of famous friends. The upper lounge features a glassless window that offers one…
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Marshall's Pen Great House
This impressive stone-and-timber great house, built in 1795, stands among beautifully landscaped gardens on a former coffee plantation turned cattle-breeding property on the northwest side of town. The 120-hectare property is owned by Jamaica’s leading ornithologist, Robert Sutton, and Anne Sutton, an environmental scientist. Robert can trace his ancestry to the first child born to English parents in Jamaica in 1655. The Suttons’ home has wood-paneled rooms brimming with antiques, leather-bound books, artwork and many other museum-quality pieces. You can tour the mini-museum by appointment only. Marshall’s Pen is splendid for birding: more than 100 species have…
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Cove
This popular cove, adjacent to Dunn’s River Falls along the A3, allows you to swim with bottlenose dolphins. Three dolphin packages are offered, notably ‘Swim with Dolphins, ’ which grants you 30 minutes in the dolphin lagoon. Professional trainers direct the sociable dolphins, who display an almost goofy desire to please. For the most expensive experience, the thrill-seeker grabs the dorsal fins of two dolphins and is lifted from the water. Even more adventurous visitors can touch and feed sharks – under the Cove’s watchful supervision. And if direct contact doesn’t appeal, basic admission includes an aquarium and pools with tropical fish, sharks, stingrays and eels, as…
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Trench Town Museum
Trench Town, which began life as a much-prized housing project erected by the British in the 1930s, is widely credited as the birthplace of ska, rocksteady and reggae music. The neighborhood has been immortalized in the gritty narratives of numerous reggae songs, not the least of which is Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, the poignant Trench Town anthem penned by Vincent ‘Tata’ Ford in a tiny bedroom at what is now the Trench Town Museum. In the days before superstardom, Bob and Rita Marley were frequent visitors and for a time even kept a small bedroom here. The museum is stocked with Wailers memorabilia, including Marley’s first guitar, some poignant photographs from…
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Rose Hall Great House
This mansion, with its commanding hilltop position 3km east of Ironshore, is the most famous great house in Jamaica. Construction of the imposing house was begun by George Ashe in the 1750s and was completed in the 1770s by John Palmer, a wealthy plantation owner. Palmer and his wife Rose (after whom the house was named) hosted some of the most elaborate social gatherings on the island. Slaves destroyed the house in the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 and it was left in ruins for over a century. In 1966 the three-story building was restored to haughty grandeur. Beyond the Palladian portico the house is a bastion of 18th-century style, with a magnificent mahogany…
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Greenwood Great House
This marvelous estate sits high on a hill 11km east of Ironhshore. Construction began on the two-story, stone-and-timber structure in 1780 by the Honorable Richard Barrett, whose family arrived in Jamaica in the 1660s and amassed a fortune from its sugar plantations. (Barrett was a cousin of the famous English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) In an unusual move for his times, Barrett educated his slaves. Unique among local plantation houses, Greenwood survived unscathed during the slave rebellion of Christmas 1831. The original library is still intact, as are oil paintings, Dresden china, a court jester’s chair and plentiful antiques, including a mantrap used for…
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Old Tavern Coffee Estate
About 1.5km southwest of the hamlet of Section and some 1200m above sea level, there’s a small, anonymous cottage that you would surely pass by if you didn’t know that its occupants, Alex and Dorothy Twyman, produce the best of the best of Blue Mountain coffee. Alex immigrated to Jamaica from England in 1958 and started growing coffee a decade later. Dorothy oversees the roasting, meticulously performing quality control by taste. The environmentally conscious Twymans keep their use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers to a bare minimum and compost all by-products before returning them to the soil. Although the Twymans’ coffee is widely acclaimed as the best on the…
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Hope Gardens
These 45-acre gardens, replete with manicured grounds, exotic plants and beautiful flowers, date back to 1881 when the government established an experimental garden on the site of the former Hope Estate. Part of the Hope Aqueduct, built in 1758 to supply the estate, is still in use. The Ministry of Agriculture, which administers the gardens, maintains a research station and nursery, although the gardens have been in steady decline for some decades and are now in a somewhat sad state. This is not to say that a visit is not rewarding; the spacious lawns, towering palms and flower-scented walkways provide a lovely respite from the urban jungle. Among the attractions are…
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National Heroes Park
The 30-hectare oval-shaped National Heroes Park was the Kingston Racecourse. Today its north end is a forlorn wasteland grazed by goats. At the park’s southern end, however, National Heroes Circle contains some intriguing statues and memorials. The tomb of Sir Alexander Bustamante is a flat marble slab beneath an arch. More interesting is the Memorial to 1865, commemorating the Morant Bay Rebellion with a rock on a pedestal flanked by bronze busts of Abraham Lincoln and a black slave with a sword. Marcus Garvey is also buried here, as is ex-premier Norman Manley, whose body was flown here from England in 1964 and reinterred with state honors. The Manley Monument,…
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Sugar-Processing Factory
Frome lies at the heart of Jamaica’s foremost sugar estate, in the center of a rich alluvial plain. The area is dominated by the Frome sugar-processing factory, on the B9 north of Savanna-la-Mar and south of the town of Grange Hill. Constructed in 1938, the factory became the setting for a violent nationwide labor dispute. During the Depression of the 1930s many small factories were bought out by the West Indies Sugar Company. Unemployed workers from all over the island converged here seeking work. Although workers were promised a dollar a day, the men who were hired received only 15 cents a day and women only 10 cents. Workers went on strike for higher pay, passions…
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Headquarters House
This trim little townhouse-turned-museum is one block north and two east of North Pde. The brick-and-timber house was originally known as Hibbert House, named after Thomas Hibbert, reportedly one of four members of the Assembly who in 1755 engaged in a bet to build the finest house and thereby win the attention of a much-sought-after beauty. It seems he lost the bet. In 1872, when the capital was moved from Spanish Town to Kingston, the house became the seat of the Jamaican legislature and remained so until 1960, when Gordon House was built across the street. Since 1983, Headquarters House has hosted the Jamaican National Heritage Trust, which has its offices in the…
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Walkerswood Plant
This village, above Fern Gully on the A3, in the cool hills of St Ann parish has, as it's main claim to fame, the tongue-searing Walkerswood jerk sauce, now available all over the world. Nobody with even a passing interest in the art of jerk should pass up the opportunity to visit the plant where its marinades and seasonings are produced. Walkerswood began as a local farmer’s co-op dedicated to providing irrigation and jobs for the community. Today, close to 200 people work full-time at the environmentally conscious plant. After a complimentary drink, the tour takes you through a herb garden complete with Mother Thyme, who explains all the spices that go in to making…
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Font Hill Beach Park & Wildlife Sanctuary
Although this wildlife reserve and beach park, on almost 1300 hectares, east of Scott’s Cove, is incongruously owned by the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica, it has not tarnished its natural beauty…after realizing the oil it initially sought offshore didn’t exist. The sanctuary, which you can only visit accompanied by a guide, has scrubby acacia, logwood thickets and, closer to the shore, a maze of connected lagoons and swamps with a population of a couple of hundred crocodiles. The birding is fabulous, highlighted by a flock of bald plate pigeons as well as assorted black-billed whistling ducks, jacanas, herons and pelicans. Two golden-sand beaches (connected by a…
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St Jago de la Vega Cathedral
From the town square, take White Church St south for three blocks to St Jago de la Vega Cathedral, the oldest Anglican cathedral in the former British colonies. It's also one of the prettiest churches in Jamaica, boasting wooden fluted pillars, an impressive beamed ceiling, a magnificent stained-glass window behind the altar, and a large organ dating to 1849.
The church stands on the site of one of the first Spanish cathedrals in the New World: the Franciscan Chapel of the Red Cross, built in 1525. English soldiers destroyed the Catholic church and used the original materials to build their cathedral. The current structure dates from 1714. Note the handsome octagonal…
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Island Village
Since its 2002 opening, this self-contained entertainment park, at the junction of Main St and DaCosta Dr, has changed the face of Ocho Rios. The 2-hectare development, brainchild of resort and media visionary Chris Blackwell, claims to resemble a ‘Jamaican coastal village.’ It doesn’t. Quibbles aside, you will find a peaceful beach, upscale craft shops, a cinema, Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville and Blue Runnings (both with bars and restaurants), a video-casino, Reggae Xplosion and a village green and amphitheater for live performances. The fences around the place reveal that this is not a public space, but rather a kind of daycare center for skittish, newly arrived…
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