Port Antonio: Jamaica's Hidden Coast

In 1946, Errol Flynn's yacht ran aground off the northeast coast of Jamaica during a storm, and one of Hollywood's biggest stars found himself stranded, briefly, in the most beautiful place he had ever seen. He never really left. Flynn bought Navy Island, built a home, and invented a new way to spend an afternoon: bamboo rafting down the Rio Grande, a gentle river journey through the jungle that banana farmers had used for transport and Flynn turned into leisure. Port Antonio was the coast where Hollywood vanished for seventy years, and the town has been quietly extraordinary ever since.

If Montego Bay is Jamaica's polished front door and Ocho Rios is its adventure base camp, Port Antonio is the coast mass tourism never reached. This was the banana capital of the world in the 1890s, the port where the fruit trade was born, where the first tourists arrived on banana boats, and where the modern Caribbean travel industry quietly got its start. No cruise-ship terminal has operated here since 2011. No all-inclusive resort strip lines the beach road. What you find instead is Boston Bay, widely credited as the birthplace of jerk cuisine, and a string of beaches, waterfalls, and lagoons that have barely changed since Flynn first swam them.

Port Antonio in 2026 is as compelling as it has ever been. The town and its surroundings were, as Jamaica's tourism minister stated publicly, "absolutely not touched" by Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, and the destination is fully open and operating. Jamaica carries a US State Department Level 2 advisory, the same as France and Mexico, which applies to the island generally and not to the tourist areas of Portland Parish specifically. The honest answer to the question travelers ask most (is Port Antonio worth visiting?) is yes: go now, before the rest of the world figures out what Errol Flynn figured out seventy years ago.