Accommodation
Most of Kingston’s hotels and guesthouses are in and around the small uptown district of New Kingston, convenient for sightseeing and close to most of the restaurants, theatres, cinemas and clubs. Only a few of the city’s accommodation options cater specifically to the tourist trade, relying instead on a steady stream of Jamaican and international business visitors, though finding a room here is rarely a problem. Unless otherwise stated, all rooms have air conditioning, cable TV, wi-fi and phone and include breakfast as part of their rates.
Carnival
If you’re in Kingston between January and April, you can take in Jamaica’s Carnival. Adopted from the Trinidadian event, Carnival is on a smaller scale here and focused more on all-inclusive parties and outdoor street jams, though it does culminate with an early-hours Jouvert (a body-paint-spattered street parade) and a traditional-style costume parade through New Kingston. Though there’s plenty of soca, dancehall is inevitably a big part of Carnival here, and you’ll see lots of DJs and bands (including local stalwarts Byron Lee and the Dragonaires) as well as big stars from Trinidad and the Eastern Caribbean – such as Alison Hinds, Machel Montano and Bunji Garlin. Events are widely publicized on the radio and in the press, and you can also contact the JTB (929 9200) or visit bacchanaljamaica.com.
Downtown
Flattened by an earthquake in 1907, downtown Kingston has lost most of its grand eighteenth-century architecture, and much of what remains is slowly crumbling into dereliction. Nevertheless, numerous historic buildings can still be found along Rum Lane, Water Lane and King Street, and if you peer into the most unlikely yards you can often find evidence of the intricate structures that used to proliferate here, with their fancy ironwork, marble floors, red-brick facades and wrap-around verandas. In recent years, government tax incentives have been created to encourage redevelopment of the area, although it is alleged that much of downtown has since been bought up by speculators, and the only evident development spawned from these incentives was the building of telecom giant Digicel’s flagship headquarters on the waterfront; their foundation also spent US$1 million restoring the famous Coronation Market to its former glory.
Though many locals still hesitate to walk the downtown streets, you’ll find that exploring on foot is not only the best way to get the full flavour of the area but also feels surprisingly safe. The usual common-sense rules apply, of course, but unless the violence that habitually breaks out in the surrounding ghettos spills over into downtown’s central commercial streets, there’s no reason to expect any problems. It’s not advisable to walk the streets at night in any part of the city; most Kingstonians don’t.
The National Gallery
The pleasantly air-conditioned National Gallery – opened in 1974 – is one of the highlights of a visit to Kingston. The permanent collection here is superb, ranging from delicate woodcarvings to flamboyant religious paintings, while the temporary exhibitions (up to four annually), including the Biennial, showcase the best of contemporary Jamaican art from the new vanguard of Jamaican painters, sculptors and mixed-media artists. Guided tours of the gallery are well worth taking, providing essential background to, and interpretation of, the works on show, and can be tailored to personal tastes.
The permanent collection consists of ten chronological galleries housed on the first floor, representing the Jamaican School, 1922 to the present. Dominating the earlier rooms are works by artists deemed to have been the forerunners of the art movement in Jamaica, including Edna Manley, John Dunkley, Albert Huie and David Pottinger. Later galleries feature the prolific work of Carl Abrahams and show a move towards abstraction which was capped by Colin Garland and David Boxer (a longtime curator of the gallery). Realism returned later with Barrington Watson, Kay Brown and Dawn Scott, whose A Cultural Object is a particularly unique and powerful re-creation of a Kingston ghetto and not to be missed. Look out for colourful, spiritual works by Everald Brown, Karl Parboosingh, Gloria Escoffery and Ralph Campbell. There is also an entire room that houses the Larry Wirth Collection of African-style sculpture and paintings by Revivalist Shepherd Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, as well as a slew of beautiful wood sculptures.
Jamaican art
Although the Tainos left paintings on cave walls and visiting British artists captured the colonial era on canvas, Jamaican art really only came into its own in the twentieth century. The island’s modern art movement was led by Edna Manley (1900–87), an English sculptor who had married prime-minister-to-be Norman Manley and moved to Jamaica in 1921, and whose arresting work has come to be seen as a turning point in Jamaican art. In 1939, she led a group of artists who stormed the annual meeting at the Institute of Jamaica to demand an end to the domination of Anglophile attitudes to art, and the replacement of the colonial portraits that hung in the galleries with works by local artists. Though more symbolic than revolutionary, their gesture did galvanize Jamaican painters and sculptors, and Manley’s classes at the Jamaica School of Art (now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts), which she co-founded, helped give direction to a new wave of local artists.
There were two distinct artistic styles in the work of this new crop of Jamaican artists. Most studied in England at one time or another and followed a classical European approach. Albert Huie (1920–2010) and Barrington Watson (born 1931) used natural forms and landscapes as reference points, incorporating the lives of black Jamaicans into their work for the first time, while Gloria Escoffery (1923–2002) played with abstract themes, depicting a range of subjects, from quiet pastoral scenes to the traditional Saturday market.
The paintings of the self-taught artists, known as “intuitives”, were perhaps more distinctive. The prodigious John Dunkley (1891–1947) made his name by covering every inch of his Kingston barber shop with pictures of trees, vines and flowers; his later paintings (now much sought after) continued his obsession with dark, brooding scenes from nature. Many intuitive artists focused their work around religious imagery. Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds (1911–89), the shepherd (head) of a Revivalist group in Kingston, became the first self-taught Jamaican painter to be fully accepted by local and foreign audiences, and is still seen as the island’s foremost intuitive sculptor and painter. Other artists such as Albert Artwell (born 1942) and Everald Brown (1917–2002) – a priest in the Ethiopian Coptic Church – concentrate on Rasta beliefs.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaican art became more experimental, most noticeably in the surrealism represented by the work of David Boxer (born 1946) and Australian-born Colin Garland (1935–2007). Today, Jamaica’s art scene continues its diversity. At the bottom end, it’s dominated by the huge carving and painting industry that has grown up around mass tourism, and although much of it is relentlessly mediocre, there is some decent art at the craft markets in Kingston and across the north coast, and in Kingston’s clutch of galleries. The establishment of the National Gallery in 1974 gave the art scene an important institutional infrastructure, and the regular exhibits of Jamaican art continue to encourage the development of young painters and sculptors, as witnessed by the proliferation of studios and galleries islandwide. You can also see the best of contemporary Jamaican art during the annual Kingston on the Edge arts festival.
East of Kingston
The main route east out of the city, Windward Road follows the coastline out of Kingston, scything through an industrial zone of oil tanks and a cement works that towers over the ruined defensive bastion of Fort Rock, now the Rockfort Mineral Baths. If the scenery looks familiar, you may be recalling the classic scene in the James Bond movie Dr No, in which Bond leaves Norman Manley Airport in a nifty red Sunbeam Alpine. A kilometre or so further on, turning right at the roundabout takes you onto the Palisadoes, a narrow sixteen-kilometre spit of land that leads out past the international airport to the ancient city of Port Royal, from where it’s a short hop to the tiny island of Lime Cay.
Jamaica on film
From Dr No to the Blue Lagoon, with Club Paradise and The Mighty Quinn in between, Hollywood has long used Jamaica as a tropical backdrop against which tales of international adventure and romance are set. Dig a bit deeper, though, and you’ll find a solid tradition of Jamaican film-making. The island’s best-known and best-loved movie is Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, which tells the story of Ivan (played by Jimmy Cliff) as he strives to make a better life for himself in Kingston. Pulling no punches in its gritty depiction of life in 1970s Jamaica, it offers a unique window into the life of the “sufferer”, and has rightly become a cult classic. Equally realistic but with a dollop of humour, Smile Orange (1974) features Ringo, a head waiter in a resort hotel, played by Carl Bradshaw, who uses all his guile and wit on tourists to overcome the harsh economic realities of contemporary Jamaica. Unsurprisingly, it still has plenty of relevance today, and is well worth seeking out despite the often poor audio quality.
The man who brought Bob Marley to the attention of the world, Jamaican impresario Chris Blackwell, also had a hand in classic Jamaican films. As well as acting as location scout on Dr No in 1962 and releasing the soundtrack of The Harder They Come on his Island label, he established Island Pictures in 1982 with the production of Countryman, a gorgeous tale woven around a scheme operated by corrupt government officials to discredit their opposition through the framing of two innocent American tourists as CIA gunrunners, and with a killer soundtrack to boot. Island were also behind The Lunatic, adapted by Jamaican author Anthony Winkler from his novel. An engaging, achingly funny mixture of burlesque humour, folklore and satirical comment on the sexual tourism prevalent in Jamaica, it stars Paul Campbell as the insane Aloysius. Campbell also starred in both Dancehall Queen (1997) and Third World Cop (1999), which together defined modern Jamaican cinema. The former tracks the fortunes of Marcia (played by Audrey Reid) as she struggles to support her family by way of being crowned dancehall queen; its underlying themes of incest and the exploitation of women generated plenty of controversy in Jamaica, and it still makes for a gripping watch. Third World Cop, meanwhile, takes the stock characters, action sequences and narrative cliché associated with the modern Hollywood action thriller and fleshes them out with distinctively Jamaican motivations and language, with Campbell playing the truly sinister baddie, Capone.
A Jamaican take on the classic gangster movie, Shottas (2002) mines the same vein of violence, albeit much more graphically, with Kymani Marley and DJ Spragga Benz playing two Kingston boys who take their life of crime from Jamaica to the US. Released in 2005, the sweet and delightful One Love represents a departure from the action genre; producer Sheelagh Farrell deliberately avoided focusing on the drugs-and-guns Jamaica, instead choosing to concentrate on the social tensions created when a pastor’s daughter falls controversially in love with a Rasta musician. Other recent films include Ghetta Life from veteran director (of Third World Cop and Dancehall Queen fame) Chris Browne, and Better Mus Come from emerging film-maker Storm Saulter, both of which revisit the theme of bridging the great divide of warring ghettos and political strife through self-empowerment and star-crossed romance.
Port Royal
PORT ROYAL, a short drive from downtown Kingston, once captured the spirit of early colonial adventure. For several decades in the late seventeenth century, Port Royal was a riotous town – the notorious haunt of cut-throats and buccaneers, and condemned by the church as the “the wickedest city in the world”. Little of that past remains, and it’s now a pleasant and hospitable little town, home to the base of the Jamaica Defence Force Coastguard and a small fishing and tourism industry. Most people who visit come for the seafood at famous Glorias, while others use the area as a launch pad for day-trips to nearby Lime Cay, a small sandy spot that offers lovely swimming and snorkelling.
Brief history
In 1655, when the English sailed into what is now Kingston harbour, they passed a cay known as “cayo de carena”, as it was where the Spanish careened their vessels to clean and caulk them. Having captured Spanish Town, the invaders set about fortifying this point, eventually building five separate forts to defend the inner harbour (the world’s seventh largest) and the town, soon to be called Port Royal, that grew up within. Over the next fifteen years, Port Royal grew through trade and was enriched by the booty of the buccaneers armed with royal commissions. It was recognized that its location at the entrance to the harbour of what became Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, needed to be strengthened, and several fortifications were built in the tumultuous period between 1655 and 1692, the year of the catastrophic earthquake, which swallowed two-thirds of the landmass. Port Royal never recovered its mercantile prominence, although it remained the western Caribbean headquarters of the Royal Navy for two centuries.
Lime Cay and around
Just fifteen minutes from Port Royal, Lime Cay is a tiny uninhabited island with white sand, blue water and easy snorkelling. It was here that Ivanhoe (“Rhygin”) Martin – the cop-killing gangster and folk hero immortalized in the classic Jamaican movie The Harder They Come – met his demise in 1948. Though you’ll often find the beach deserted on weekdays (bring your own refreshments), it’s a very different story at the weekends, when hordes of Kingstonians descend to display their latest designer swimwear and relax with friends, and music blares from the stalls selling cooked meals and cold beers.
Pirates and buccaneers
To assist with the defence of their new Caribbean colonies, English, French and Dutch governors turned to the buccaneers, who were more than willing to plunder Spain’s towns in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The earliest buccaneers were a ragged assortment of deserters, fugitives and even runaway slaves who banded together on the island of Tortuga on the Atlantic coast of present-day Haiti. They lived by hunting wild pigs and cattle (brought to the island by European settlers), smoking their meat on a wooden frame over a pit known as a boucan (hence the name boucaniers). When the game became scarce they took to the open sea to prey on shipping, especially Spanish.
As their numbers and their skills increased, the buccaneers became a serious fighting force under resourceful leaders like Henry Morgan, who had arrived with the English army. Morgan’s successful sack of the city of Panama with three thousand men in 1671 coincided with the conclusion of a peace treaty between England and Spain. After a brief incarceration in the Tower of London to appease the Spanish, Morgan returned to Jamaica as Lieutenant Governor with a mandate to eradicate what was now deemed piracy.
Reminders of the era of piracy at Port Royal include Gallows Point at the end of the promontory and, offshore, Rackham’s Cay where “Calico Jack” Rackham, after being executed, was squeezed into a cage and hung in the air as a warning to others. His two accomplices, Anne Bonney and Mary Read, escaped punishment by declaring themselves pregnant.