What you can see on the Ocho Rios cam
The camera turns between several views of the centre of town: an open space of parked cars below shopfronts painted bright blue and yellow, with wooded hills behind the rooftops, a small green park on a curving road and the stands where taxis wait. It is not a beach view: it shows Ochi on an ordinary day, and whether the sky over the hills is clear or heavy with rain.
The centre of Ocho Rios
Mounted above the centre of Ocho Rios, this camera moves between several views of the town. One takes in an open space where cars park in rows below shopfronts painted blue and yellow, with wooded hills behind; another follows a curving road past a small green park with yellow-painted kerbs; another looks down on the taxis and minibuses that gather to pick up passengers.
It shows the town rather than the resorts: how busy Ochi is, whether the cruise passengers have come ashore and whether rain is gathering over the hills. See Jamaica streams it on YouTube, with the date and time printed in the corner.
A name that is not about rivers
Despite the name, Ocho Rios does not mean "eight rivers". It is an English corruption of Las Chorreras, "the waterfalls", the name the Spanish gave this stretch of coast for the streams that tumble down from the hills to the sea. The most famous of them is Dunn's River, which drops in a staircase of limestone terraces straight onto the beach. Visitors climb the falls from the sand upward, often hand in hand in a long human chain.
When to watch Ocho Rios
Ocho Rios shares Jamaica's single time zone, with no change of clocks in summer. Town is busiest from mid-morning, and on cruise days the centre fills with passengers on their way to the falls and the shops. The wettest months are usually May and October, when showers build over the hills in the afternoon, and tropical storms are a risk through the summer and autumn.
Nearby
Dunn's River Falls is about 3 km (2 miles) west of the centre. Fern Gully, a road that winds through a former river gorge lined with tree ferns, climbs south from town. In the hills of St Ann, about an hour's drive inland, the village of Nine Mile is where Bob Marley was born and where he is buried. To the east lie Oracabessa, where Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond novels at his house, GoldenEye, and Firefly, the hilltop home of Noël Coward near Port Maria.
Getting there
Most visitors fly into Sangster International in Montego Bay, about an hour and a half away along the North Coast Highway; the small Ian Fleming International Airport, east of town, takes regional flights and private planes. Cruise passengers land at the pier on the bay, a short walk from the centre.
