What you can see on the Montego Bay cams
One camera looks down from a hotel onto Doctor's Cave Beach: tall coconut palms, a pool lined with red umbrellas, a strip of pale sand and water that runs from turquoise over the shallows to deep blue further out. Another turns between views of Sam Sharpe Square and the old downtown, where painted two-storey buildings with balconies line streets full of cars, shoppers and vendors. Between them they show the beach visitors come for and the town where Jamaicans go about their day. A time-lapse of the beach camera replays the last 24 hours.
Sam Sharpe Square, downtown Montego Bay
This camera turns between several views of the heart of downtown Montego Bay. Most look over Sam Sharpe Square: the railed circle with its fountain, the taxis and minibuses that swing around it, and the shopfronts and fast-food signs on the far side. Another looks down a street of old two-storey buildings painted blue and white, busy with cars, shoppers and vendors.
It is the MoBay that most beach visitors never see: busy, colourful and working. See Jamaica streams it on YouTube, stamped with the date and time.
Doctor's Cave Beach from the S Hotel
High on the S Hotel, right on the beach, this wide-angle camera takes in the whole scene below. On the right rise the hotel's white towers; below them, a pool edged with rows of red umbrellas and loungers; then a grove of tall coconut palms, a strip of pale sand and the sea, clear turquoise over the shallows and deep blue beyond, out to a long horizon.
It is the view for the state of the water at Doctor's Cave: how calm and clear it is, how busy the beach and the pool are and what the sky is doing over the bay. The hotel publishes it on its own website, and this site shows it through Windy.
Doctor's Cave and the Hip Strip
Doctor's Cave Beach has been a bathing club since the early twentieth century, when the clear water here earned a reputation for being good for the health. It lies on Gloucester Avenue, the Hip Strip, the seafront road of bars, restaurants and souvenir shops just north of downtown. The reefs offshore belong to the Montego Bay Marine Park, protected since the early 1990s, so the reef and its fish are close to shore for snorkelers.
Sam Sharpe and the 1831 rebellion
The heart of downtown is Sam Sharpe Square, named after the Baptist deacon who led the slave rebellion that broke out in western Jamaica at Christmas 1831. Sharpe was hanged in Montego Bay in 1832; the uprising hastened the end of slavery in the British colonies, and he is today one of Jamaica's National Heroes. A monument to him stands in the square.
When to watch Montego Bay
Montego Bay is on UTC−5 with no daylight saving time, so its clock matches New York's in winter and runs an hour behind it in summer. Mornings usually bring the calmest sea at Doctor's Cave, before the trade winds pick up, and the late afternoon the softest light over the bay. Storms are most likely from August to October, at the height of the hurricane season.
Nearby
East of town, Rose Hall is a restored great house from the late eighteenth century, and further along the coast, near Falmouth, bamboo rafts drift down the Martha Brae River. Negril, with its long beach and the cliffs of the West End, is about an hour and a half's drive to the west.
Getting there
Sangster International Airport is about 5 km (3 miles) east of downtown, and most of the north coast's resorts are reached from here. Jamaicans drive on the left.
