Saint Mary Region Guide

Saint Mary is the quiet, green, deeply rural stretch of Jamaica’s north coast, and the one the big resorts skipped.

This is where Ian Fleming built a house above a private cove at Oracabessa and wrote every James Bond novel in it, and where Noel Coward lived and is buried on a hilltop with one of the finest views on the island.

The coast is a run of small bays, river mouths and black-sand beaches between banana plantations and forested hills, with almost no development for long stretches.

Inland there are rivers to raft, waterfalls with nobody at them, and the botanic gardens at Castleton on the road up to the mountains.

And Port Maria is an old parish capital of faded Georgian and Victorian buildings around a bay with an island in it.

Oracabessa

The cove and the house where Ian Fleming wrote fourteen Bond books between 1952 and 1964, now a hotel with the desk still in place. The public beach next door has a bar and calm water, and the bay is a working fish sanctuary with good snorkelling over restored coral.

Firefly

Noel Coward’s hilltop house above Port Maria, kept much as he left it, with his piano, his paintings and his grave on the lawn. The view along the coast from the terrace is the reason he built there and is worth the trip on its own.

Port Maria

The old parish capital: a Georgian courthouse, St Mary’s parish church, a crescent bay with Cabarita Island offshore, and a monument to Tacky.

Rivers and falls

Rafting on the Rio Nuevo and the White River, the waterfalls at Kwaaman near Robin’s Bay, and river swimming almost anywhere inland.

Castleton

Botanical gardens founded in 1862 on the road up toward the mountains, with enormous old specimen trees.

Saint Mary is rural, slow and unpretentious, and it has a longer memory than most of the island.

Farming country

This was banana country, and for a period around 1900 the parish was one of the richest agricultural districts in the Caribbean. That economy has shrunk but the landscape and the small farms remain, and most people here still have a relationship to land.

Tacky

The parish was the centre of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760, the most serious uprising of enslaved people in eighteenth-century Jamaica, and it is commemorated locally rather than as a footnote. This history is present in the place names and in how people talk about the parish.

Outsiders

A strand of well-known foreigners settled here from the 1940s — writers, actors, musicians — drawn by the privacy, and their houses are now the parish’s best-known sights. Locals treat this with some amusement.

Music

Sound systems, church choirs and the string-band mento tradition, which survived in the country districts.

Pace

Nothing is in a hurry. Adjust accordingly.

This parish has the tourism it wants, not the tourism it was given. Saint Mary stayed small while the north coast west of it filled with all-inclusives, and the local businesses — guesthouses, river guides, roadside kitchens — are mostly family-owned. Staying and eating locally here has a directly visible effect.

Oracabessa Bay is a fish sanctuary, established with the community and now one of the more successful in the Caribbean, with a coral restoration programme and a turtle nesting project. Do not touch coral, take shells or fish inside the sanctuary.

Turtles nest on several beaches between June and November. Keep off nesting areas after dark, and use no lights on the beach.

Rivers: take your rubbish, and avoid soap and shampoo in the water, which people downstream use.

Buy from the roadside: the banana, breadfruit and jelly coconut stalls are the parish’s economy.

December to April is the driest and most reliable stretch, and the best time for beaches, rivers and hiking.

May and October to November are the wet peaks. Saint Mary is one of the wetter parishes, and a wet month here means genuine rain.

June to November is hurricane season, with the greatest risk between August and October. The north coast is exposed.

July and August are hot, humid and busy with Jamaican holidaymakers and returning diaspora, and the parish is livelier for it.

Turtle nesting runs from about June to November at the protected beaches, with hatchlings from August.

For rivers and waterfalls, a few days after rain gives the best flow without dangerous water.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the region

Saint Mary has an unusually wide spread: some of the cheapest rural accommodation in Jamaica sits a few kilometres from some of the most expensive private villas in the Caribbean, with very little in between.