Saint Catherine, in the southeast of the island, holds the most historic city in Jamaica: Spanish Town. Founded by the Spanish in 1534 as Villa de la Vega —also called Santiago de la Vega or St. Jago de la Vega—, it was the capital of the island for more than three hundred years, both under Spanish rule (1534-1655) and British (1655-1872), until Kingston definitively replaced it.
Its historic square, the Spanish Town Square (today Emancipation Square), is surrounded by one of the most valuable ensembles of Georgian architecture in the Caribbean, with the old Government House (King's House), the House of Assembly and the Cathedral of Saint James (Saint Jago de la Vega), considered the oldest Anglican church in the Western Hemisphere outside the British Isles.
It's a heritage treasure today threatened by deterioration and abandonment, but of incalculable historical value: to walk through its square is to travel through the political heart of colonial Jamaica, the setting of three and a half centuries of decisions that marked the fate of the island.
In Spanish Town much of the history of Jamaica was decided. It was the center of Spanish colonial power, then the British capital from which the rich sugar colony was administered, and finally the setting of its liberation. The city concentrated for centuries the courts, the assembly, the archives and the residence of the governors.
The culminating moment came at midnight on August 1, 1838, when Governor Sir Lionel Smith read from the portico of the King's House, in the square, the Emancipation Proclamation that definitively ended the slavery of some 300,000 people in Jamaica. To that same King's House Paul Bogle and his followers would march in 1865, on the road that would lead to the Morant Bay Rebellion. The square is, thus, one of the great places of memory of freedom in the Caribbean.
The parish takes its name from Catherine of Braganza, queen consort of Charles II of England in the 17th century, and its history interweaves the three great matrices of the nation: the indigenous Taíno, the colonial Spanish and British, and the African of the enslaved and freed people.
On the north side of the Spanish Town Square stands the Rodney Memorial, one of the most notable colonial monuments in Jamaica. It was erected to commemorate the victory of Admiral George Rodney over a French fleet at the Battle of the Saintes, on April 12, 1782, which thwarted a feared invasion of the island and saved Jamaica for the British Empire.
The monument includes a statue of the admiral carved by the English sculptor John Bacon and an elegant architectural ensemble with cannons captured from the French, integrated into the Georgian ensemble of the square. It's one of the most photographed pieces of Spanish Town and a symbol of the strategic importance that the island had in the naval wars of the 18th century.
Around the square, the Georgian heritage of Spanish Town —public buildings, churches, mansions— composes a historic ensemble unique in the Caribbean, a testimony to the era when this city was the capital of one of the richest colonies in the world.
Saint Catherine combines an agricultural past with an increasingly urban and industrial present. Its fertile plains, watered by the Rio Cobre, were the cradle of extensive cane plantations in colonial times, and even today they keep a strong agricultural vocation. The Rio Cobre also crosses the spectacular Bog Walk Gorge, crossed by the historic Flat Bridge, an 18th-century bridge without railings.
In recent decades, the proximity to Kingston transformed the parish. It's today the second most populous in the country, and its urban growth gave rise to Portmore, an enormous dormitory city built on a former coastal land of the Dawkins family —the Dawkins Salt Pond Pen, renamed in the 19th century in honor of the Earl of Portmore—. Together with the industrial estates of the southeast, Portmore integrated Saint Catherine into the great economic corridor of the capital.
Thus, the parish articulates two worlds: that of the colonial heritage of Spanish Town and that of the urban and industrial Jamaica of the present, in one of the most dynamic and densely populated territories on the island.
Few parishes condense so much history as Saint Catherine. In its territory cross the three great matrices of the nation —the Taíno, the European and the African—, and Spanish Town was for centuries the setting where the laws were dictated, the colony administered and, finally, the freedom of the enslaved proclaimed.
Beyond its old capital, the parish offers natural attractions like the Rio Cobre gorge and the Bog Walk Gorge, and an urban dynamism that places it at the center of the economic life of the Jamaican southeast. Between the Georgian heritage, the agricultural plains and the bustle of Portmore, Saint Catherine is at once a historical archive and an engine of the present.
Visiting Spanish Town —its square, its cathedral, the Rodney Memorial, the King's House of emancipation— is a glimpse of the historic heart of Jamaica, an essential place for understanding how the island went from a Spanish colony to a British sugar colony and, finally, to a free nation, and all of it a step from the modern capital.