Montego Bay

Christopher Columbus named the bay Golfo de Buen Tiempo, the "fair weather gulf", in 1494. Under Spanish rule it was a port where lard from the wild hogs of the forests was shipped, along with leather and beef, and early maps show it as Bahía de Manteca — Lard Bay — the most likely origin of its name. After the English took Jamaica in 1655 the parish of St James was created, and its estates made Montego Bay the largest sugar producer on the island; more than 150 ships a year arrived bringing enslaved Africans and supplies and leaving with sugar, and by 1773 the town had the only newspaper outside Kingston.

The island's last great slave revolt, the Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War of 1831–32, broke out in and around Montego Bay. Plantations were set on fire before the British crushed it; many rebels were hanged, among them its leader, the Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe, executed in the town in 1832. Sharpe was later made a national hero, and the main square was renamed in his honour. After emancipation the sugar economy declined, and the port turned to bananas and coffee.

Tourism changed the city in the 20th century. The Freeport was built on the Bogue Islands in the 1960s, Sangster airport grew into the busiest in the English-speaking Caribbean, and resorts spread along the coast, some on the grounds of old sugar estates. Montego Bay was proclaimed a city by act of parliament in 1980, though it remains part of the parish of St James. In October 2025 Hurricane Melissa flooded much of the city, including the port, the industrial park and the airport terminal.

Montego Bay is Jamaica's "Second City", known to everyone as MoBay. Music is the strongest part of its identity: the singer Jimmy Cliff was born in the parish, and every July Reggae Sumfest, the largest music festival in the Caribbean, brings a week of beach parties, a street dance on the Hip Strip, sound clashes and two nights of reggae and dancehall stars. The city has also had a long life in popular culture, from Bobby Bloom's 1970 hit "Montego Bay" to scenes of the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die.

The memory of slavery and resistance runs through the city, in the square named after Sam Sharpe, the teachers' college in Granville that also carries his name, and the great houses of the old estates, where Rose Hall turns its White Witch legend and the lives of the people enslaved there into a museum.

Most people are of African descent, with long-established East Indian and Chinese communities, descendants of 19th-century indentured workers; Chinese Jamaican families run many of the shops and supermarkets downtown, and East Indian families many of the gift and jewellery shops. Church shapes much of community life, with Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Church of God, Seventh-day Adventist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic congregations, and Rastafari has a significant following.

The parish of St James, of which Montego Bay is the capital, had about 185,000 people in 2012. The city carries most of the weight of Jamaica's tourism: most of the country's visitors arrive and leave through its airport or port, and international hotel groups run resorts along the coast. Business process outsourcing also employs people in the city, alongside the free port, banks, the Cornwall Regional Hospital and campuses of the University of the West Indies and the University of Technology.

Life divides sharply between the tourist coast and the rest of the city. The hotels, villas and golf courses of the Hip Strip, Ironshore and Rose Hall stand apart from downtown, with its crowded shopping streets and transport centre. Traffic congestion is a problem the government plans to ease with a tolled bypass from Westgate to Ironshore.

Hurricane Melissa in October 2025 flooded much of the city and cut communications across the western parishes. Power was restored to Montego Bay first to restart tourism in the hotels that had escaped damage, but the airport's traffic in December 2025 was down by more than 48% on a year earlier, and repairs to housing, roads, water and power continued into 2026.

Jerk is the city's everyday showpiece: chicken and pork rubbed with Scotch bonnet pepper, pimento — allspice — thyme and scallion and cooked over coals, often with festival, a sweet fried dumpling, on the side. Open-air jerk stands on Gloucester Avenue cook it in front of their customers, and seafood restaurants line the strip, serving dishes such as escovitch fish, fried and doused in a spicy pickle.

Away from the tourist restaurants, the cook shops of downtown serve the food Jamaicans eat at home: ackee and saltfish, curry goat, brown-stew chicken and oxtail with rice and peas — rice cooked with kidney beans and coconut milk — and the patty, a flaky pastry of spiced meat, as the standard snack. The shops of the city centre also sell Jamaican coffee and spices to take home.

A cold Red Stripe beer in its brown bottle is the classic drink by the sea, along with Jamaican rum, fresh juices and, at Christmas, sorrel.