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A stone monument on the Palisadoes near to Port Royal records that “the first coconut tree was planted March 4, 1869 by John Norton Esquire Superintendent of the General Penitentiary”. Within 20 years 20,000 trees had been planted and flourished for a while, an ambitious project aimed at covering the Palisadoes in Coconut trees. Eventually disease destroyed them leaving only the stone monument. |
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Discover the inherent charm of villages with names like Standfast, Wait-A-Bit, Me-nuh-sen-yu-nuh-come, or Nonsuch |
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Resort Areas
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Portmore |
| Portmore is one of the island's most densely populated zones. The fast developing 'Sunshine Community' has within the past three decades, successfully provided home ownership opportunities for many Jamaicans. The early communities of Waterford, Gregory Park, Edgewater and Bridgeport have now been joined by the largest housing development project in the country's history - the Greater Portmore Development Scheme. Educational, Health, and Commercial facilities now render the area almost self-sufficient, but the corporate area's dormitory community is still connected to the capital by the heavily trafficked Causeway Bridge. Created to relieve the extreme housing pressures of Kingston's population, most of Portmore was built on low-lying swampland of south St. Catherine that was dredged and filled. The community began to explode with the construction of the Causeway, a roadway built on a sliver of land separating Hunt's Bay from the Kingston Harbour that provided a direct connection between downtown Kingston and the new housing schemes. Today, Portmore houses the majority of the city of Kingston labour force, a young neighbourhood demographically, but in many ways a blending of new and old.
To the south of the housing schemes is Port Henderson, one of the oldest ports in the island, which once served as the main landing point for passengers destined for Spanish Town. Port Henderson at the time also shared a reasonable segment of the area's commercial activity, but today is no longer used as a shipping port. There are a few buildings in that area which represent the island's architectural heritage - the old Water Police Station, which now houses Rodney's Arms Restaurant; the Two Sisters twin cottages; the Chapel, Rodney's Lookout, and Grass Piece Lookout. Even before Spanish and English colonial occupation, however, the first Jamaicans, the Taino, inhabited the Portmore area.
On the fringes of Portmore, several valuable collections of Taino artefacts have been recovered, and there are two small museums dedicated to displaying these valuable pieces of the past; one at White Marl, a small community to the north of Portmore, and the other by Two Sisters Cave in the Hellshire Hills. |
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