The Gate Swings Open: One St Ann Ruling Puts Jamaica’s Beach Law on Trial

Marcus Goffe, attorney for JaBBEM and the residents, called the injunction “the right decision at this stage.” The stakes run well beyond one cove. If a court accepts a customary right here, the same argument is open to communities on other contested shores — Jacob Taylor Beach in Trelawny, where the Supreme Court in September temporarily stopped the Natural Resources Conservation Authority from evicting shop operators; Bob Marley Beach at Bull Bay, where a Rastafari community fears a private land sale; and Portland, where 73-year-old campaigner Wilbourn Carr said the Little Dunn’s River order gives hope to fights across the island.

The 1956 Law Nobody Defends

At the root of every one of these disputes is the Beach Control Act of 1956. Passed before Independence, it placed the foreshore and the seabed under the Crown — now the State — and lets the state license beach use. What it does not do is give ordinary Jamaicans a general right to walk, bathe or fish on the shore. Where land behind a beach is privately held, the owner controls who gets through.

Even the government now concedes the law is broken. Tabling a Beach Access and Management Policy in Parliament in March, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said the 1956 Act and its 1973 amendment never adequately addressed access and “will have to be replaced.” The policy proposes a “qualified right” to walk along the foreshore and bathe at public beaches, a target of at least one high-standard public beach in every parish, and upgrades to nine beaches, including Fantasy Beach in St Ann and Watson Taylor Beach in Hanover.

Critics say that is still permission, not a right. JaBBEM argues the policy makes access conditional on compliance with rules. The Jamaica Environment Trust wants beaches recognised in law as a public commons held in trust, and objects that the policy defines a “public beach” by government ownership — meaning a beach on private land can never qualify, however long the public has used it.

The Battle of the Numbers

In August the government went on the offensive. Over a single week, the Ministry of Tourism said Jamaica has 70 recognised public beaches, that 74.7% of the “sandy beach coastline” is public, and that 60 public bathing beaches are free to enter. Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett accused critics of creating a false impression abroad. Environment Minister Matthew Samuda dismissed the widely shared “1%” figure as “complete, total nonsense.”

The state’s own records tell a harder story. NEPA data, compiled by JaBBEM president Dr Devon Taylor and researcher Dr Emiel Martens, show about three miles of the island’s 494-mile coastline designated as public beach, plus two miles of public bathing beaches tied to hotels. That is roughly 1% — and 0.6% once hotel beaches are set aside. The government’s own policy paper gives similar figures in kilometres: about 4.5km of public beach and 2.9km of hotel-linked beach on a 795km coast.

The ministry’s defenders have a fair point: much of any coastline is cliff, mangrove or port, and only about 30% of Jamaica’s is sandy. So count beaches instead of miles. In 2000, NEPA recorded 87 public recreational beaches against 336 tied to hotels, guest houses and villas. By 2025, public beaches had fallen to 72 — about 17% of the total — while private and tourist beaches had climbed to roughly 352. Whichever way the shoreline is measured, the public share is small and shrinking.

The Caribbean Outlier

Jamaica’s neighbours, with the same colonial history, settled this question long ago.

Thirty Kilometres for a Point

The campaign has moved from the courtroom into the water. On Sunday 25 October, Australian human rights lawyer and marathon swimmer Eva Buzo swam about 30km along the north-west coast, from Half Moon Bay in Falmouth to One Man Beach in Montego Bay, in roughly ten hours. It was the second leg of JaBBEM’s Swim for Rights campaign, after a 40km swim in Puerto Rico earlier in the month. Supporters met her on the sand chanting “free beach.”

“A nation that cannot touch its own shoreline is not fully free,” Dr Taylor said. The cause has drawn some of the loudest names in Jamaican music — Bounty Killer, Sizzla, Keznamdi and Ziggy, Stephen and Cedella Marley among them.

What It Means for Coastal Property

Beachfront land is the most valuable real estate on the island, and the tourism economy built on it is enormous — Jamaica welcomed 2.9 million stopover visitors and 1.2 million cruise passengers in 2024. That is exactly why this fight matters to buyers, developers and lenders, not just bathers.

• Title is not the whole story. If courts accept that long public use creates a customary right, a beachfront title may come with public access attached. Buyers should ask how a shore has been used — by fishermen, vendors, footpaths — not just who owns it.
• Policy is moving one way. The Prime Minister, campaigners and environmental groups now agree the 1956 Act must go. Any replacement is likely to widen public access along the foreshore, not narrow it.
• Disputes are now costly. Locked gates draw injunctions, protests and international headlines. Developments that plan public access from the start carry less legal and reputational risk.

For now, the gate at Little Dunn’s River stays open seven days a week. On 30 November, the case returns to court — and with it, a question Jamaica has avoided for seventy years: is the beach a birthright, or a privilege the state can grant and take away?

Jamaica Homes News is independent. Coastline and beach figures are from the National Environment and Planning Agency and the Government of Jamaica’s Beach Access and Management Policy.