While rights to coastline access are hotly contested just about anywhere there is a wave, things in Jamaica have become aggressively exclusive. According to Jamaica’s own National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), a meager 2.8 miles of the nation’s 494-mile coastline is open to the public. The rest? Corporations, ultra-luxury hotels, and private residences are at liberty to grant—or violently restrict—access to anyone they choose.
In a recent report for Airmail, travel correspondent Ben Ryder Howe traveled to Montego Bay and the north coast to document the grim reality for ordinary beachgoers. “The beaches seemed to exist in an enclosed world, barricaded behind thick, high walls,” Howe noted, pointing to the dwindling access points for local kids to cliff-jump and swim.
Ironies abound in the report. Howe’s copy was sandwiched between two massive Ralph Lauren ads—the very fashion mogul who owns the Round Hill Hotel and Villas, set on a 110-acre private peninsula outside Montego Bay. Intended or not, it’s a bold swing against the publication’s own advertisers, to be sure.
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The privatization stretches to iconic waters. In 2022, the Blue Lagoon—the freshwater spring-fed cove made famous by the 1980 film—closed for “renovations.” It partially reopened in 2023 under heavy restrictions and new entry fees. Visitors are now obligated to cross private land owned by Blue Hole Holdings Limited, a corporate landowner with tight ties to Sandals, Jamaica’s second-largest company—which smacks of nebulous if not downright nefarious dealings, does it not?
So, what is a local surfer or swimmer of modest means to do when they fancy a dip, much less a surf? “We realized what was happening,” Devon Taylor told Howe. Taylor is a biomedical researcher and the leader of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JABBEM).
The deepest irony lies in Jamaica’s history. When the nation claimed its independence from British rule in 1962, it became the only Commonwealth country where the departing British eliminated the thousand-year-old legal tradition that all citizens have an ownership stake in their beaches. On the exact date Jamaica gained independence, it barred its own citizens from its own shores via the Beach Control Act. It criminalized swimming, bathing, fishing, and walking on the sand without commercial right.
Knock British common law as you will, but this is a barbaric treatment of a people who by and large rely upon the sea, particularly on a newborn nation’s behalf, and it shall not and will not stand, if JABBEM and the local surfing community (looking at Billy Wilmot and clan along with their Jamnesia crew) continue to have anything to say about it.
To dive deeper into the fight for Jamaica’s coastlines, read Ben Ryder Howe’s full on-ground reporting in Airmail, and track down JABBEM’s documentary Beach Inna Bondage, which just took home Best Documentary at the 2026 Caribbean Film Awards.
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