Oracabessa

Where it sits. Oracabessa is a small town on Jamaica's north coast in the parish of Saint Mary, about 20 kilometres east of Ocho Ríos and 13 kilometres west of Port Maria, strung along the main coastal road where it dips to a sheltered bay. The name is generally traced to the Spanish oracabeza, golden head, for the way the headland catches the afternoon light. Behind the town the land climbs quickly into banana and coconut country; in front of it the reef runs close inshore, breaking the swell and leaving a band of calm turquoise water. The population is a few thousand, and the working centre is a short strip of shops, a fish market and a bus stop rather than a resort promenade.

A banana port that became something else. For the first half of the twentieth century Oracabessa's economy was fruit. The bay had a wharf where schooners and then steamers of the United Fruit Company loaded green bananas for Britain and the United States, and the town's fortunes rose and fell with the trade until it collapsed in the 1960s. What replaced it, indirectly, was a writer. In 1946 Ian Fleming bought fifteen acres of clifftop here — a former donkey racecourse above a private cove — for two thousand pounds, and built the house he called Goldeneye. He returned every January and February for the rest of his life, and the presence of Fleming and of his neighbour Noël Coward, whose houses Blue Harbour and Firefly stand a few kilometres east at Port Maria, made this stretch of Saint Mary a fixture in the British press of the 1950s.

The Bond geography of the coast. Fleming wrote every James Bond novel at Oracabessa, and the coast repaid the compliment. Dr. No (1962), the first Eon film, was shot largely in Jamaica in early 1962: the beach where Honey Ryder walks out of the sea is Laughing Waters, a private strand near Ocho Ríos, and the freshwater trek across the fictional Crab Key was filmed on the rivers of Saint Ann to the west, with Kingston, Port Royal and the pier at Ocho Ríos supplying the rest. Fleming, who was at Goldeneye that winter, visited the unit at work. Live and Let Die (1973) came back to the island for the invented republic of San Monique, using the Green Grotto Caves near Runaway Bay and a crocodile farm at Falmouth. When the series returned to Jamaica for No Time to Die (2021), the production based itself further east around Port Antonio rather than here, but the retired Bond it shows living quietly in a house above the water is an unmistakable nod to Fleming's own arrangement at Oracabessa. Pierce Brosnan's first film simply took the house's name: GoldenEye (1995).

What there is to do. James Bond Beach, on a small peninsula east of the harbour, is the town's public face — a narrow crescent of sand with a bar, changing rooms and a stage that has hosted concerts, opened under Chris Blackwell's Island Outpost in the 1990s. More interesting to many visitors is what happens offshore. The Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary, declared in 2011 and run in partnership with local fishers who now act as its wardens, is a no-take zone with coral nurseries and staghorn outplanting sites; fish biomass and coral cover inside it have recovered measurably, and it has become one of the better-documented community marine reserves in the Caribbean. Snorkelling trips run over the nursery sites, and the sanctuary team gives talks. Inland, Sun Valley Plantation offers tours of a working smallholding of coconut, banana and cocoa.

Around the town. Firefly, Noël Coward's hilltop house at Port Maria, is a 15-minute drive east and worth the trip for the view alone: the terrace looks down over Cabarita Island and the whole eastern coast, and the house is preserved much as Coward left it, with his studio, his piano and his grave on the lawn. Port Maria itself has a fine early nineteenth-century courthouse and a monument to Tacky, who led an uprising of enslaved Africans in 1760. Fleming and Ann Charteris were married at Port Maria in March 1952, with Coward as a witness.

Getting there and timing. Ian Fleming International Airport, three kilometres east at Boscobel, took its present name in 2011 and handles private and light charter traffic; the main gateway is Norman Manley International at Kingston, roughly two hours away over Junction Road, or Sangster International at Montego Bay, about two and a half hours west along the coast road. December to April is the dry, cooler half of the year and the reliable window; the hurricane season runs June to November, with September and October carrying the highest risk. The reef keeps the water swimmable most days, but the north coast picks up northerly swell in midwinter.