Long before the European arrival, the territory of Saint James was inhabited by the Taíno: archaeology has identified at least twenty-five sites where the parish's first inhabitants lived, drawn by its bays, its rivers and its fertile land. When Christopher Columbus reached this coast in early May 1494, the Spanish named the place the Gulf of Good Weather.
The name that prevailed, however, has another root. Montego Bay derives from the Spanish 'manteca' (lard): in the area pigs were raised whose fat produced lard, and sailors knew it as the bay where that product was loaded. Thus, the great tourist destination of the Caribbean carries written in its name the modest pig farming of Spanish Jamaica.
During the neglected Spanish rule, this northwestern corner of the island was little more than an anchorage. The real transformation came under England: Saint James was constituted as a parish and its coast filled with sugar plantations, while the nascent Montego Bay began to grow as an exporting port.
The town of Montego Bay was established in the early 18th century, and several sources link its founding to Captain Jonathan Barnett, a rich Saint James planter. Throughout the century, 'MoBay' established itself as one of the main sugar ports on the island, the exit point for the sugar and rum produced by the estates of the whole northwestern region. It suffered serious fires in 1795 and 1811, and was devastated again in 1831 by Sam Sharpe's rebellion, but it was always rebuilt.
Since the mid-20th century, its bay of turquoise waters and its white-sand beaches made it the main tourist center of Jamaica. Today it's the second largest city in the country, with Sangster International Airport —the busiest on the island—, the all-inclusive resorts of the 'Hip Strip' and a lively urban life around Sam Sharpe Square.
Among its attractions are picture-postcard beaches like Doctor's Cave, Cornwall, Aquasol and Ironshore, as well as marine parks and golf courses. For most visitors, Montego Bay is the gateway to Jamaica and the departure point toward Negril, Ocho Rios and the Blue Mountains.
Saint James was the epicenter of the greatest slave uprising in the history of Jamaica. Its protagonist, Samuel 'Sam' Sharpe, was a Baptist deacon from Montego Bay who, born a slave, had learned to read and write and closely followed the abolitionist movement in London. On Christmas 1831 he planned a peaceful general strike: the slaves would demand freedom and wages and would refuse to work after the holidays.
The movement began at Kensington Estate and spread throughout the western region of the island, turning into an uprising in which up to 60,000 of the colony's 300,000 slaves took part. Known as the Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War, it was repressed with a ferocity far greater than the rebellion itself: some 500 slaves died in the fighting or were executed afterward, and Sharpe was hanged on May 23, 1832, in the central square of Montego Bay.
The impact was enormous. The rebellion prompted two detailed parliamentary inquiries in London and, together with abolitionist pressure, accelerated the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Today Sam Sharpe is a National Hero of Jamaica, the square where he was executed bears his name, and his face appears on the 50-Jamaican-dollar note.
Around Montego Bay great plantation houses are preserved, and the most famous is Rose Hall, an imposing Georgian great house built by John Palmer between 1770 and 1780. Nicknamed the 'calendar house' for supposedly having 365 windows, 52 doors and 12 bedrooms, it presided over a lucrative sugar estate worked by more than 2,000 slaves, whose opulence was sustained on extreme violence.
Rose Hall is famous for the legend of Annie Palmer, the 'White Witch of Rose Hall', a supposed sadistic mistress said to have murdered husbands and lovers and practiced voodoo. In reality, that story was largely invented by the novelist Herbert G. de Lisser in his 1929 book, almost a century after abolition; the historical Annie Palmer died in obscurity in 1846, and much of the tale is later tourist folklore.
Restored in the 1960s, the mansion is today one of the most visited attractions on the island, with daytime and nighttime 'haunted' tours. Beyond the legend, Rose Hall is an eloquent testimony to the world of the plantations that made Saint James one of the richest —and most brutal— regions of the sugar Caribbean.
The past of Saint James is inseparable from sugar and rum, engines of its colonial economy that left a legacy of estates, mills and great houses spread across the parish, as well as important urban heritage. In Montego Bay stands the parish church of Saint James, a notable cruciform Georgian temple consecrated in 1782, damaged by the 1957 earthquake and rebuilt, with valuable funerary monuments from the plantation era.
In the interior of the parish, towns like Cambridge, Catadupa, Anchovy and Montpelier preserve the memory of the railway and of the rural life of sugar Jamaica. That whole network of estates and hamlets fed the port of Montego Bay, which as early as the 18th century exported sugar, rum and coffee to Europe.
Today that history coexists with a powerful tourist infrastructure. The combination of Caribbean beaches, rebellion history and colonial heritage makes Saint James the most international face of Jamaica and the destination through which most travelers get to know the island, often without suspecting the historical density hidden behind its resorts.