Saint Mary
Discover Saint Mary
Introduction
Saint Mary is a north-coast parish east of Ocho Rios, and it is the quiet end of Jamaica’s north shore — green, hilly, still largely agricultural, and without the resort development of the parishes on either side.
Its history is bananas. Port Maria and the coast around it shipped fruit to Britain and North America from the 1870s, and the loading of banana boats overnight is where the work song everybody knows comes from. The plantations have mostly gone, but the landscape they shaped — small farms, river valleys running down off the interior hills — is what the parish still looks like.
Oracabessa is the other reason it is known. Ian Fleming bought land above the beach here in 1946, built a house he called Goldeneye, and wrote every one of the James Bond novels in it over the following fourteen winters; the beach below is now named after the character. Noël Coward built Firefly on the ridge above and is buried there, with one of the best views on the island from his garden. Beyond those, the parish offers the White River, Robin’s Bay on the eastern edge where the coast turns wild and the road runs out, and a series of small waterfalls and swimming holes that see a fraction of the crowds at Dunn’s River.