Kingston Parish
Discover Kingston Parish
Introduction
Kingston is Jamaica’s capital and the cultural engine of the whole Caribbean’s music. It sits on one of the largest natural harbours in the world, with the Blue Mountains rising steeply behind it — close enough that you can be in coffee country at a thousand metres within an hour of leaving the city.
The music is the reason most visitors come. Reggae was made here, largely in the government yards of Trench Town, and the Bob Marley Museum occupies the house and studio at 56 Hope Road where he lived and where he was shot in 1976. Studio One, Tuff Gong and the sound systems that carried all of it are part of the same small geography. The city also has the National Gallery, the strongest collection of Jamaican art anywhere, and Devon House, a nineteenth-century mansion built by the Caribbean’s first black millionaire, which now sells the island’s best ice cream.
Across the harbour on a spit of sand is Port Royal, once the richest and most notorious port in the Americas, most of which slid into the sea in the earthquake of 1692 and is still down there. Kingston has a security reputation, and it is specific rather than general: the uptown areas, the museums and the Blue Mountains are straightforward, and local advice about which downtown streets to avoid is worth taking.