Jamaica

• 1. Land Of Wood And Water

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  The Ciboney people who first lived here called the island Xaymaca, a word meaning the Land of Wood and Water, or the Land of Springs. Today that island is Jamaica, covering 10,990 square kilometres of mountain, coast, and forest in the Caribbean Sea. It is the third-largest island in the Greater Antilles, smaller only than Cuba and Hispaniola.

  Kingston is its capital and largest city, but the island's reach stretches far past its shores. Jamaica is the birthplace of the Rastafari religion and reggae music, along with the genres of dub, ska, and dancehall. It has sometimes been called the world's least populous cultural superpower. How does a place this small carry an influence this large?

  The answer runs through Christopher Columbus, who claimed the island for Spain in 1494, and through the Africans brought here in chains, and through an independence won on the 6th of August 1962. It runs through Maroon fighters in the mountains, a city swallowed by an earthquake, and a national bird locals simply call the doctor bird. To understand Jamaica, you have to follow each of these threads back to the island it shaped.

• 2. Conquest And Captivity

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  Christopher Columbus was the first European to see Jamaica, landing in 1494 on his second voyage to the Americas. His probable landing point was Dry Harbour, later called Discovery Bay, and he named the first land he sighted Saint Gloria. When he returned in 1503, he was shipwrecked, and he and his crew lived on the island for a year while waiting to be rescued.

  Juan de Esquivel established the first Spanish settlement, Sevilla, in 1509, only for it to be abandoned around 1524 as unhealthy. The capital then moved to Spanish Town, known as St. Jago de la Vega, around 1534. As the Taino died in large numbers from disease and enslavement, the Spanish began importing enslaved Africans to replace them.

  Many of those Africans escaped into the remote interior, mixing with surviving Taino and forming autonomous settlements known as Maroons. By the early 17th century, no more than 2,500 to 3,000 people are estimated to have lived on the island. Spain held it under the name Santiago until an English fleet arrived in 1655.

  Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables led that invasion, following a failed attempt to take Santo Domingo. Spanish defeats at Ocho Rios in 1657 and the Rio Nuevo in 1658 sealed the conquest. In 1660 the Maroon leader Juan de Bolas switched from the Spanish to the English, and that defection helped secure the island for England.

• 3. Sugar And Its Rebellions

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  Black Africans formed a majority of the population by the early 1670s, as the English built sugar cane plantations worked by enslaved people. In 1660 the population had been about 4,500 white and 1,500 black. The Irish made up two-thirds of the white population in the late 17th century, many transported by force as political prisoners during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Cromwell also sent 1,200 Scots prisoners of war, who became known as indentured and skilled labourers.

  The First Maroon War, fought from 1728 to 1739 or 1740, ended in stalemate. The British signed treaties with the Leeward Maroons led by Cudjoe and Accompong in 1739, and with the Windward Maroons led by Quao and Queen Nanny in 1740. Tacky's War, a large slave rebellion, broke out in 1760 but was defeated by the British and their Maroon allies.

  By the start of the 19th century, black people outnumbered white people by a ratio of almost 20 to 1. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but not slavery itself. In 1831 the Baptist War erupted, a huge rebellion led by the Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe, ending in hundreds of deaths and ferocious reprisals.

  Britain outlawed slavery across its empire in 1834, with full emancipation declared in 1838. The population in 1834 stood at 371,070, of whom 311,070 were enslaved. Facing a labour shortage as freedmen turned to subsistence farming, the British recruited indentured workers from India beginning in 1845 and from China in 1854.

• 4. Crown To Commonwealth

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  Paul Bogle led the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, which Governor John Eyre put down so brutally that he was recalled from his post. His successor, John Peter Grant, enacted social and political reforms, and Jamaica became a Crown Colony in 1866. In 1872 the capital was transferred from Spanish Town to Kingston.

  Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in 1917, championing greater political rights, Pan-Africanism, and the Back-to-Africa movement. He was one of the chief inspirations behind Rastafari, founded in Jamaica in the 1930s, which combined Christianity with an Afrocentric theology focused on Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia.

  The Great Depression hit the island hard, and during the British West Indian labour unrest of 1934 to 1939, a strike in 1938 turned into a riot. A new House of Representatives was established in 1944, elected by universal adult suffrage. The two-party system emerged then, with the Jamaica Labour Party under Alexander Bustamante and the People's National Party under Norman Manley.

  In 1958 Jamaica joined the Federation of the West Indies, but a referendum saw a slight majority vote to leave. Full independence came on the 6th of August 1962, with Bustamante, at the age of 78, becoming the country's first prime minister. The new state kept its place in the Commonwealth and adopted a Westminster-style parliamentary system.

• 5. Two Parties, Hard Decades

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  Strong economic growth, averaging roughly 6 percent a year, marked the first ten years of independence under JLP governments. That growth was fuelled by bauxite and alumina quarrying, tourism, and manufacturing. Donald Sangster, one of the successive prime ministers, died of natural causes within two months of taking office.

  Michael Manley and the PNP won in 1972 with 37 seats to the JLP's 16, responding to a growing sense of inequality among many Afro-Jamaicans. Manley enacted a higher minimum wage, land reform, and women's equality legislation, improved ties with the Communist bloc, and opposed apartheid in South Africa. In 1976 the PNP won 47 seats to the JLP's 13 on a turnout of 85 percent, even as oil shocks and rivalry fed political and gang violence.

  By 1980 the gross national product had fallen to about 25 percent below its 1972 level. Voters chose Edward Seaga and the JLP that year, 51 seats to nine. Firmly anti-Communist, Seaga cut ties with Cuba and sent troops to support the United States invasion of Grenada in 1983.

  Alumina producers Alpart and Alcoa closed, Alcan cut production, and Reynolds Jamaica Mines left the industry. Rising debt drove the government to seek IMF financing tied to austerity, and criticism of its response to Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 sharpened discontent. P. J. Patterson then led the PNP to a run of landslides, winning 52 seats to eight in 1993 and 50 to 10 in 1997.

• 6. Power In The 21st Century

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  Portia Simpson-Miller became Jamaica's first female prime minister when she replaced P. J. Patterson on the 26th of February 2006. The next year the JLP narrowly defeated the PNP, 32 seats to 28, ending 18 years of PNP rule and making Bruce Golding prime minister. His tenure was dominated by the global recession and by an attempt in 2010 to arrest the drug lord Christopher Coke, which erupted in violence and over 70 deaths.

  Golding resigned and was replaced by Andrew Holness in 2011. A survey that year showed about 60 percent of Jamaicans believed the country would have been better off had it remained a British colony, with only 17 percent believing it would have been worse off. The PNP returned to power under Simpson-Miller in the 2011 election, taking 42 of a newly expanded 63 seats.

  Holness and the JLP won the 2016 election by a single seat, 32 to 31, and voter turnout dipped below 50 percent for the first time at 48.37 percent. In 2020 Holness secured a second consecutive win, 49 seats to 14 over a PNP led by Peter Phillips, though turnout fell to just 37 percent. In the 2025 election Holness won a third consecutive term, the first time the party had won three in a row, with 34 seats to 29 on a turnout of 39.5 percent.

• 7. Mountains, Reefs, And Storms

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  Blue Mountain Peak rises 2,256 metres, the tallest point on an island whose interior is dominated by ranges like the John Crow Mountains and the Dry Harbour Mountains. Kingston Harbour is the seventh-largest natural harbour in the world, a feature that helped make the city the capital in 1872. Montego Bay, on the north coast, is one of the best-known tourist cities in the Caribbean.

  The island holds about 3,000 species of native flowering plants, more than 1,000 of them found nowhere else, including 200 species of orchid. The only non-bat native mammal still living here is the Jamaican hutia, known locally as the coney. None of the island's eight native snake species is venomous, and the red-billed streamertail, called the doctor bird, is Jamaica's national symbol.

  Jamaica sits within the Main Development Region for Atlantic tropical cyclones and suffers storm damage as a result. Hurricanes Charlie and Gilbert struck directly in 1951 and 1988. In 2025, Hurricane Melissa made landfall as a Category 5, far surpassing Gilbert as the strongest landfalling storm in the island's history.

  Tourism is the largest foreign exchange earner, drawing about 4.3 million visitors a year and accounting for 32 percent of total employment and 36 percent of GDP. That dependence ties the country's fortunes to its coral reefs, since the sand and sea travellers come for rely on healthy reef ecosystems already strained by nutrient pollution and development.

• 8. Out Of Many, One People

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  Out of Many One People is the national motto, reflecting roots that run across continents. According to the 2011 census analysed by the University of the West Indies, the population is 76.3 percent African descent, 15.1 percent Afro-European, 3.4 percent East Indian and Afro-East Indian, 3.2 percent white, 1.2 percent Chinese, and 0.8 percent other. Most Jamaicans see Jamaican nationality as an identity in itself, rather than identifying by race.

  Jamaican English is the official language, used in government, the courts, the media, and education. The primary spoken language, though, is Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole that linguists consider a distinct language. A 2007 survey found 17.1 percent of people monolingual in standard English, 36.5 percent monolingual in Patois, and 46.4 percent bilingual.

  Many Jamaicans have emigrated, and it was estimated in 2004 that up to 2.5 million Jamaicans and their descendants lived abroad. About 800,000 live in the United Kingdom, the country's largest African-Caribbean group, with large communities also in the United States and Canada. A smaller group are Jamaicans in Ethiopia, mostly Rastafarians who view Africa as Zion, living in the town of Shashamane about 150 miles south of Addis Ababa.

  Christianity is the largest religion, with about 70 percent of people Protestant, while the Rastafari movement recorded 29,026 adherents in the 2011 census. A small Jewish community of about 200 worships at Kahal Kadosh Shaare Shalom in Kingston, built in 1912, one of the few synagogues in the world with sand-covered floors. From Garvey's call to return to Africa to the doctor bird on the national emblem, the threads first spun on this Land of Wood and Water still reach outward today.