🇯🇲 Jamaica · Southeast and mountains
Port Royal is one of the most fascinating and history-laden places in all the Caribbean. Today it's a quiet fishing village at the tip of a peninsula, at the entrance to Kingston harbor, where you eat an unforgettable fried fish and breathe calm. But three and a half centuries ago, this same place was quite the opposite: the lair of the most fearsome pirates in the Caribbean, a city so rich, unrestrained and sinful that it earned the nickname 'the wickedest city on Earth'.
From Port Royal operated legendary buccaneers like Henry Morgan, who raided the Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver, and then spent their loot in the taverns, brothels and gambling houses of a city awash in wealth and vice. Until, in 1692, an enormous earthquake made much of the city literally sink beneath the sea in a matter of minutes, a catastrophe that many interpreted as divine punishment. Today, a 'sunken city' lies beneath the waters of the harbor.
This guide covers Port Royal with a practical and warm eye: how to visit Fort Charles and learn the history of the pirates, what remains of the sunken city, where to eat the best fish, how to combine it with Kingston and why this small village is one of Jamaica's great historic jewels. It's the unmissable destination for lovers of history, pirates and good stories.
Port Royal, at the tip of the Palisadoes peninsula, at the entrance to Kingston harbor, was founded by the English after the conquest of Jamaica in 1655. Thanks to its strategic position, it was fortified and quickly became a key port. During the second half of the 17th century it lived its era of greatest fame: the English authorities encouraged the buccaneers and privateers (like the famous Henry Morgan, who became lieutenant governor of Jamaica) to use Port Royal as a base to attack Spanish ships and ports. The loot from those raids made Port Royal one of the richest cities in the New World, but also one of the most licentious, with its taverns, brothels and gambling houses: it became known as 'the wickedest city on Earth'. On June 7, 1692, a violent earthquake and the subsequent tsunami made much of the city sink beneath the sea and thousands of people died; many saw it as divine punishment for their sins. The survivors founded Kingston across the harbor. Port Royal never recovered its splendor: it kept some British naval importance (with Fort Charles and the Royal Navy base), but it dwindled to a fishing village. Today it's a historic site of enormous value, with a 'sunken city' underwater that is the subject of archaeological study. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital of Jamaica and the birthplace of reggae: an intense and authentic city at the foot of the Blue Mountains, born from the ashes of Port Royal in 1692, where Bob Marley lived and where the Trench Town neighborhood saw the rise of the music that conquered the world. In its parish, historic Port Royal, 'the wickedest city on Earth' that an earthquake sank into the sea in 1692.
Read the history of Parish of Kingston →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Port Royal begins with the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655. When the British forces wrested the island from Spain, they immediately understood the strategic value of the tip of the Palisadoes peninsula, a long tongue of sand that closes off and protects the enormous Kingston harbor, one of the best natural anchorages in the Caribbean. Whoever controlled that point controlled the access to the harbor and, in large measure, the defense of the southeast of the island.
The English hastened to fortify the place, building a series of forts —among them the one that would become known as Fort Charles— and developing a settlement they called Port Royal. Thanks to its position, its deep waters that allowed ships to dock, and the protection of the harbor, Port Royal quickly became an active port and a key point for the trade and defense of the new English colony.
In those early years, however, the English had a problem: Jamaica was a newly taken colony, threatened by the Spanish who wanted to recover it and surrounded by the rival powers of the Caribbean. The defense of the island and the harassment of the Spanish enemy became a priority, and that would lead Port Royal down a path as prosperous as it was turbulent: that of piracy.
The great fame of Port Royal was born of its relationship with piracy. In the second half of the 17th century, the English authorities, who could not defend Jamaica with their scant regular forces alone, decided to encourage the buccaneers and privateers to settle in Port Royal. The idea was to use them as an irregular and cheap fleet to attack the ships and ports of the Spanish empire, weakening the enemy and, in passing, enriching themselves with the loot.
The strategy worked spectacularly. Port Royal became the base of the most fearsome pirates in the Caribbean, who set off from here to raid galleons laden with gold and silver and to sack Spanish cities. The loot they brought back was fabulous, and the city became immensely rich. The most famous of these buccaneers was Henry Morgan, author of daring and devastating attacks (like the sacking of Panama), who in an astonishing twist of history ended up being knighted by the British Crown and serving as lieutenant governor of Jamaica.
At its height, Port Royal was one of the richest and most populous cities in the New World, a hive of merchants, sailors, pirates and adventurers where gold, rum and every vice flowed. That prosperity based on plunder and excess gave it its unique character and its legend, but also a reputation that would pursue it to its tragic end.
The enormous wealth that the pirate loot brought to Port Royal had an inevitable consequence: the city became a place of excess and vice without equal in the New World. The buccaneers who returned with their pockets full of Spanish gold spent it lavishly, and Port Royal filled with taverns, gambling houses, brothels and all kinds of establishments devoted to pleasure and squandering.
It was said that Port Royal had an astonishing density of taverns per inhabitant, and that the rum flowed without stop. The city earned, for its licentiousness, its violence and its relaxed morals, the nickname by which it would pass into history: 'the wickedest city on Earth'. For the preachers and pious souls of the era, Port Royal was a nest of sin, a Caribbean Sodom and Gomorrah that sooner or later would receive its punishment.
This reputation, a mix of real facts and legend fed by fame, is an essential part of Port Royal's historic appeal. The city embodied the wildest and most ambiguous face of colonial expansion in the Caribbean: a place where the border between hero and criminal, between the privateer in the king's service and the outlaw pirate, blurred completely, and where the wealth obtained by violence was spent on pleasure.
The end of Port Royal's golden age came suddenly and catastrophically. On June 7, 1692, at mid-morning, a violent earthquake shook the area. The sandy ground on which the city sat liquefied (the phenomenon of soil liquefaction), and much of Port Royal —it's estimated close to two thirds of the city— literally sank beneath the waters of the harbor in a matter of minutes, dragging buildings, streets and people to the bottom of the sea. A subsequent tsunami completed the destruction.
Thousands of people died, on the spot or in the following days from injuries and disease. What had been one of the richest and most populous cities in the New World was reduced to ruins and to a portion submerged underwater. For many contemporaries, especially the preachers, there was no doubt: the earthquake was the divine punishment that 'the wickedest city on Earth' deserved for its sins, an interpretation that reinforced the legend of the place.
The catastrophe of 1692 had a fundamental historical consequence: the survivors, faced with the destruction of Port Royal, founded a new city across the harbor, on solid ground. That city would be Kingston, the future capital of Jamaica. Thus, from the disaster of the pirate city was born the island's great modern metropolis. Port Royal, for its part, would never recover its splendor.
After the catastrophe of 1692, Port Royal tried to be reborn, but it never recovered its former splendor. Other disasters —fires, hurricanes and a new earthquake in 1907— struck what remained of the city, thwarting the attempts at large-scale reconstruction. Economic activity and the population shifted definitively toward Kingston, which grew to become the great city of Jamaica.
What Port Royal did keep for a long time was its military and naval importance. Thanks to its strategic position and forts like Fort Charles, it was a base of the British Royal Navy in the Caribbean, and figures like the young Horatio Nelson passed through there, the future admiral and hero of Trafalgar, who was stationed at the fort in the late 18th century. The naval function kept a certain relevance to the place even when the city was no longer what it had been.
Over time, Port Royal was reduced to a quiet fishing village, very different from the bustling and rich pirate city of old. But its extraordinary history and, above all, its 'sunken city' —the remains of old Port Royal that lie beneath the waters of the harbor— gave it a new value: that of an exceptional underwater archaeological site, studied by archaeologists who have recovered objects and reconstructed the life of the 17th-century city. Today, Port Royal combines the calm of a fishing village with the fascination of one of the most singular historic sites in the Caribbean.