A Barbed Wire Fence on Negril’s Beach Went Viral. It Was Gone by Evening

• A dive instructor strung barbed wire to protect equipment
• A hotelier’s morning jog video went viral instantly
• Authorities removed it the same day it was reported
• Only 0.6% of Jamaica’s coastline is freely accessible

A barbed wire fence strung across Negril’s Seven Mile Beach by a dive instructor protecting his equipment went viral within hours after hotelier Winthrop Wellington filmed it during his morning jog, igniting a fresh Caribbean-wide debate over who actually owns Jamaica’s beaches before authorities ordered the fence removed the same day it was reported.

Diego Heaven, an instructor at the Reef Explorer dive centre, a tenant of the Urban Development Corporation, cited repeated theft of beach chairs and paddleboards as his reason for putting the barbed wire up. The Negril Destination Assurance Council confirmed the removal happened within hours of the video circulating, a resolution speed that, ironically, only sharpened public attention on the underlying issue the fence had briefly made visible: how little of the country’s coastline the public can actually access at all.

The figure at the centre of the ensuing debate, that only 0.6 percent of Jamaica’s 1,022-kilometre coastline remains freely accessible to local residents, comes from JaBBEM, the same organisation this publication has covered pushing back against government’s own beach access framework as enclosure rather than genuine reform. The Negril fence incident landed in the same window as Prime Minister Andrew Holness tabling a Beach Access and Management Policy during the 2026-27 Budget Debate, intended to replace the outdated Beach Control Act of 1956 that currently vests foreshore rights in the Crown.

A single strand of barbed wire, put up for an entirely mundane reason and removed within a day, ended up doing more to illustrate Jamaica’s beach access debate than months of policy discussion had managed: the fence itself was trivial and quickly gone, but the 0.6 percent figure it briefly made visible, and the new policy tabled around the same time, remain exactly where they were before the video went viral.