People from St. Ann believe with some justification that it is the most blessed of all 14 parishes in Jamaica. Its natural beauty has earned it the enviable title of the ‘garden parish’; its coastline provides it with some of the most stunning beaches; its waterfalls attract hundreds of thousands of locals and visitors all year round and it now rivals St. James as the tourist mecca of Jamaica.
The dominant physical feature is the Dry Harbour Mountain range with its individual peaks like Mount Diablo, Mount Alba and Mount Zion. An important feature of St. Ann is its caves and sinkholes. Because of its predominant limestone formation there are some 60 caves in the parish the most famous of which are the Green Grotto Caves located between Runaway Bay and Discovery Bay and which is a popular tourist attraction.
Then there are its rivers and waterfalls of which the White River is the longest, flowing for 27.4 kilometres and forming the boundry with the neighbouring parish of St. Mary. Because of its tumbling rapids, the White River offers an attraction that no other river in Jamaica does – White River rafting. Other rivers like the Roaring River which is actually harnessed for electricity and Dunn’s River appear intermittently, rising a few kilometres from the coast . Dunn’s River itself might be unspectacular, but its fame is derived from the world-famous Falls where an icy-cold stream tumbles some 600 feet down naturally formed stone steps on to a white sand beach. Dunn’s River Falls is one of Jamaica’s best known and most popular holiday attractions and arguably the finest attraction of its kind anywhere in the world. Along with the iconic photograph of rafting on the Rio Grande, the image of visitors climbing Dunn’s River Fall is the most popular image used in the promotion of Jamaican tourism. When taken together, all these physical attributes make the parish of St. Ann a true representation of the very meaning of the name Taino name for Jamaica – Xaymaica, meaning ‘Land of Wood and Water”.
These and a series of other smaller rivers have also given the town of Ocho Rios its name. Translating literally as eight rivers in Spanish, it is believed that in spite of that association the name was a corruption by early English settlers because of the similarity of sound Los Chorreras ‘the waterfalls’ , the name by which it was known as late as 1841. Today Ocho Rios is the centre of a major resort complex whose development stretches some 40 miles along the coastline eastwards to Oracabessa in neighbouring St. Mary.
Ocho Rios might be the centre of tourism in the parish but its capital is St. Ann’s Bay which has a special place in the island’s history because this is where Jamaica’s recorded history began with Columbus’s first Jamaican landfall. He called it Santa Gloria ‘ on account of the extreme beauty of the country’ and here nine years later , he was to spend more than a year as a castaway, a longer time than anywhere else in the New World. Here too in 1510, Spanish settlers planted their first capital, Sevilla la Nueva, New Seville and the first European settlement in Jamaica. Discovery Bay (from which it gets its name) is often thought to be the site where Columbus and his sailors actually first came ashore but historians differ,some insisting that it was in fact the horseshoe-shaped bay at modern Rio Bueno. Whatever; its still in the parish of St. Ann!
Seville – Where it all Started
The other major town along the coast is Runaway Bay. It is believed that the name stems from the traffic in runaway enslaved Africans to Cuba. Runaway Bay is a good point of departure for many attractive highland towns and villages including Brown’s Town home to several educational institutions including the Browns Town Community College and St. Hilda’s High School for Girls; Claremont and Moneague known for its disappearing lake and from which its name is derived the corruption of the Spanish mono agua. Noteworthy too is the Moneague Teachers College part of which is housed in the former Moneague Hotel which around the turn of the 19th century was thought to be among the best in the island.
The tourist industry is of course the lifeblood of the St. Ann economy. Portlanders often boast that the industry was born in that parish but even before the first major hotel the Titchfield was opened there in 1897, the Moneague Hotel in St Ann was attracting visitors to the parish. In many respects Ocho Rios and the chain of St Ann hotels that now dot the coast from Discovery Bay in the West all the way to the St. Mary border town of Oracabessa to the east, are late bloomers behind Portland and St. James in tourist development although traditional European-style hotels like Jamaica Inn (still in operation) Shaw Park, Plantation Inn and the Tower Isle hotels were among the island’s finest, dating back to the 1950s. St Ann and Ocho Rios in particular entered the mass tourism market starting in the 1970s with the construction of the cruise ship pier and the development of a multi-hotel and apartment complex at Turtle Bay in the town. These were rapidly followed by the opening of shopping malls and duty-free shopping for cruise ship passengers, a range of restaurants and entertainment centres to which have been added amusement parks and adventure tours targeting the younger generation of visitors.
As if its natural beauty, tourism attractions and its rich history are not enough, St Ann is also the parish where bauxite was first discovered and mined, opening up major industry for the country and providing employment and a source of foreign exchange. It is a relatively new industry dating back to 1943 when analysis of soil samples from a property in the parish was found to be almost pure bauxite, the source for aluminum. The first shipments were made in 1952 and since then two St. Ann ports, Ocho Rios and Discovery Bay have served as the shipping points for the product to the USA.
St. Ann’s gifts to the world also include its people and among them none more famous than musical icon Robert Nesta Marley who was born in the village of Nine Miles in the parish. Other musicians from the parish who have made an impact on the local and international stage include Winston ‘Burning Spear’ Rodney, Shabba Ranks, and Busy Signal and Romain Virgo of more recent vintage. Equally impactful and of enormous influence on Marley and other musicians is the Rt. Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the first National Hero of Jamaica. Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay and his philosophy of black pride has reverberated throughout the world particularly in Africa and its Diaspora even to the present day. The Marcus Garvey Secondary School in the town of his birth and a statue outside the parish library in St. Ann’s Bay are two of the many monuments that have been erected in his honour.
