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Beyond the turnoff for Folly the A4 meanders east of Port Antonio through the coastal villages of Drapers, Frenchman’s Cove and Fairy Hill. This is where most visitors to Port Antonio, and indeed to Portland, will find accommodations and explore the nearby Rio Grande Valley, Nonsuch Caves, Blue Lagoon as well as the luxuriate sands of Frenchman’s Cove, San San Beach and Winnifred Beach.
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Cupping an unruffled bay while backing into the sleepy Rio Grande Valley, Port Antonio is the perfect capital for Portland. The parish’s only sizable town is largely untarnished by the duty-free, tourist orientation of Ocho Rios or Montego Bay, its streets, squares, quayside and market inviting leisurely strolls – invitations freely accepted by the town’s dog and goat populaces. Wandering away from the bustle past the dilapidated houses lining the potholed streets of Titchfield Peninsula, it’s very easy to think you’ve roamed onto the set of some quaint colonial ghost town.
Taking its name from the Spanish oro cabeza (golden head) Oracabessa, 21km east of Ocho Rios, is a small one-street, one-storey village with a vague aura of a Wild West town. The street itself is lined with Caribbean vernacular architecture, its wooden houses trimmed with fretwork. This was a major port for shipping bananas in the 19th-century, yet while the boom era has passed, the town itself is far from derelict.
Wrapped around a small bay with postcard-worthy snugness, Ocho Rios is a former fishing village that the Jamaica Tourist Board earmarked for tourism in the mid-1980s. Whatever character Ocho Rios lost when the local nets were redirected from fish to the tourist dollar, its streets today are lined with interchangeable duty-free shopping plazas and fast-food emporia, persistent higglers (street vendors) and would-be tour guides, and a palpable air of waiting for something.
The northeast coast is Jamaica’s windward corner, where surf rolls ashore into perfect beach-lined coves and waves chew at rocky headlands. Colonial-era edifices are relatively few, though beautiful pocket-size beaches line the shore. You’ll also find several unspoiled fishing villages where budget travelers can ease into a laid-back local lifestyle.
In the 1970s, Negril lured hippies with its offbeat beach-life to a countercultural Shangri-la where anything goes. To some extent anything still goes here, but the innocence left long ago.
Negril, 81km west of Montego Bay, is the vortex around which Jamaica’s fun-in-the-sun vacation life whirls. You’ll soon find yourself falling in love with Negril’s insouciance and its scintillating 11km-long beach sliding gently into calm waters reflecting a palette of light blues and greens. Coral reefs lie just offshore, and you’ll want your camera close by to record the consistently peach-colored sunsets that get more applause than the live reggae concerts.
Morant Bay, the only town of importance along the south coast, squats on a hill behind the coast road. Most of the town’s early colonial-era buildings were burned in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, led by the town’s national hero, Paul Bogle, but a couple of gems remain.
A bustling town with a turbulent history, a thriving port and a hopping ‘hip strip, ’ Montego Bay is Jamaica’s most charged city. While spring-breakers descend on MoBay each year for bouts of ritualized raucousness, being host to the island’s busiest airport and cruise-ship port assures the town a steady stream of visitors, many of whom pop down from North America for long weekends.
This village sprawls along a valley that runs northwest from Mandeville in the lee of the forested north face of the Don Figuerero Mountains. The B6 leads northwest from Shooter’s Hill, winding, dipping and rising past lime-green pastures dotted with guango and silk-cotton trees and crisscrossed with stone walls and hedgerows.