A Community Takes Sandals to Court: The Legal Fight for Montego Bay’s Providence Beach

Briefing

• Legal action filed at St James Parish Court in October 2025.
• Flanker communities seek to protect historic beach access and fishing rights.
• Sandals Montego Bay plans US$9 million overwater bungalow development.
• EIA lists 50 low-wage jobs as the primary community economic benefit.
• Case raises island-wide questions about foreshore rights and resort expansion.

On Monday, 6 October 2025, legal proceedings began in the St James Parish Court that placed one of the world’s most recognisable resort brands in direct confrontation with the fishing communities whose lives have long been shaped by the coastal strip beside it. The action, reported by Voice Online and brought by the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement, the Flanker Resource Centre, and neighbouring communities around Providence Beach, sought to protect rights that the claimants argued had existed for generations and were now under direct threat.

At issue was a development proposal by Sandals Montego Bay — one of several flagship properties operated by Sandals Resorts International — that would involve the construction of 18 overwater bungalows, pylons, a supporting boardwalk carrying utility infrastructure, 10 villa-style suites, and significant coastal modification works including wetland conversion. The project would be the resort’s third overwater bungalow development on the island. According to the Jamaica Gleaner, Sandals planned to invest approximately US$9 million — around J$1.4 billion at contemporary exchange rates — in the development.

What the Community Is Protecting

The legal action centres on the communities’ rights to use a track or roadway across the land for beach access, their right to use and navigate the sea, and the preservation of the sea channels that their fishing boats have traversed for decades. These are not abstract entitlements. Providence Beach and the surrounding coastal area are part of a working landscape for communities in Flanker and nearby areas: families that have fished these waters, baptised in them, raised children beside them, and built their livelihoods around them.

The legal basis for the claim rests on the Prescription Act of 1882, under which rights of way and usage patterns established over long periods acquire legal recognition. The argument is that the access route to the beach and the use of the sea channels are not merely customary but legally protected under prescription — and that the proposed development would physically obstruct or extinguish those rights without any legal authority to do so.

The Environmental Impact Assessment

An Environmental Impact Assessment was prepared in connection with the Sandals development proposal and submitted as part of the approval process. JaBBEM reviewed the document and drew attention to what it described as a stark imbalance between the economic benefits claimed for the project and its community and environmental costs. The EIA, according to JaBBEM’s analysis, listed approximately 50 jobs — categorised as butlers, housekeepers, cooks, chefs, landscapers, waiters, concierge representatives, and lifeguards — as the primary economic return to the local community from a US$9 million capital investment.

The environmental concerns centred on the construction of structures over the sea in an area where reef and wetland habitats are present, and on the conversion of wetland areas as part of the development footprint. Overwater bungalows in the Caribbean context have attracted sustained scientific criticism for their potential to damage seagrass beds, restrict water circulation, and create shading effects that degrade benthic habitat beneath the structures. In a country where coral reef and seagrass degradation is already an established problem — NEPA launched its inaugural Coral Reef Awareness Month in September 2025 in direct response to accelerating reef decline — the cumulative effect of repeated overwater structure approvals is a legitimate environmental policy concern.

The Broader Pattern

The Providence Beach case did not arise in isolation. It is part of a pattern that JaBBEM has documented across multiple parishes, in which hotel developments — particularly luxury, all-inclusive operations — have progressively extended their physical footprint into coastal areas that were previously accessible to local communities, through a combination of physical construction, fencing, security arrangements, and, in some cases, the legal acquisition of land that had previously been used without formal title by fishing families.

Sandals is not a uniquely problematic actor in this landscape. It is, rather, a very visible example of a structural pattern in which the terms on which coastal development is approved do not give adequate weight to the rights and interests of the communities that have historically used the coastline. The fact that the company’s proposed development had passed through the EIA process did not, in the view of the claimants, extinguish the common law and statutory rights that predated any planning application.

Implications for Coastal Development Approval

The Providence Beach legal action has implications that extend well beyond the specific site. If the court finds that the Flanker and Providence communities hold prescriptive rights that override or qualify the development approvals obtained by Sandals, the judgment will create a legal precedent that could be applied to future development proposals along Jamaica’s coast — and potentially to the retrospective assessment of existing ones.

It would also strengthen the argument, consistently made by JaBBEM, that the current regulatory framework for coastal development in Jamaica is structurally inadequate: that it routinely approves projects without adequately investigating or protecting the informal and common law rights of communities that have used coastal land and sea for generations. The five active cases that Dr Devon Taylor was pursuing as of late 2025 represent a sustained legal strategy, not a single challenge, and the cumulative weight of those cases could ultimately compel a more fundamental reassessment of how Jamaica manages the intersection between commercial coastal development and community rights.

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