Kingston was born on July 22, 1692, a few weeks after the earthquake that destroyed Port Royal: the survivors took refuge on the mainland, across the harbor, in a place known as Colonel Barry's Hog Crawle, and there they laid out a new city on a grid plan. In May 1693, the Assembly formally constituted it as a parish. Its magnificent natural harbor —one of the largest in the world— and its strategic position made it grow rapidly as a commercial center for sugar and the slave trade.
By 1716 it was already the largest city and the main commercial center of Jamaica. In 1872, after a century of pressure from local merchants, Kingston replaced Spanish Town as the island's capital. The 1907 earthquake, which killed some 800 people and razed much of the historic buildings south of the Parade, forced it to be rebuilt, and since then it has established itself as the great political, economic and cultural center of the country.
Few places in the world weigh so heavily on contemporary popular music as the humble neighborhoods of west Kingston. Trench Town —originally Trench Pen, developed by the colonial housing authority as a model township project, with houses, schools and even a theater, the Ambassador— became the crucible of rocksteady and reggae in the 1960s and 1970s.
There Bob Marley formed The Wailers, and there he composed classics like 'Trenchtown Rock' and 'No Woman, No Cry', which immortalized the neighborhood. Today the legacy is preserved at the Trench Town Culture Yard, now a museum and National Heritage Site, and at the Bob Marley Museum, housed in the Hope Road home where the artist lived his last years. Kingston still beats to the rhythm of reggae and dancehall, and is the heart of the Rastafari movement and of Afro-Jamaican identity.
At the tip of the Palisadoes peninsula, at the entrance to Kingston harbor, is Port Royal. In the 17th century it was the lair of privateers and buccaneers —the most famous, Henry Morgan— and one of the richest and most licentious cities in the Caribbean, with more than 8,000 inhabitants, taverns and brothels; so famous for its vice that it was called 'the wickedest city on Earth'.
On June 7, 1692, a catastrophic earthquake of a magnitude near 7.5, followed by a tsunami, sank much of the city beneath the sea through the liquefaction of the sandy soil, killing some 2,000 people on the spot. Today Port Royal is a quiet fishing village and a fascinating historic and archaeological site —one of the few underwater sites of a sunken city in the world—, easy to visit from Kingston, with Fort Charles and the remains of that pirate splendor.
Kingston is a very different city from the tourist Jamaica of the resorts: it's the real capital, raw and vibrant, seat of the government, the university (the University of the West Indies, in Mona) and the country's main cultural institutions. In it the affluent neighborhoods that climb toward the hills of Saint Andrew coexist with the ghettos of the west that gave the world its music.
Among its attractions are National Heroes Park, where heroes like Marcus Garvey, Norman Manley and Sam Sharpe rest; Devon House, the 19th-century mansion of Jamaica's first Black millionaire; and an intense life of concerts, recording studios and sound systems. It's the gateway to the Blue Mountains and the best place to understand the Jamaica behind the postcard.