Briefing
- JNHT restricts public access to the Blue Lagoon, Portland, in August 2022.
- Closure cites safety, heritage management, and commercial arrangement reviews.
- Portland community, tourism operators, and advocates object strongly.
- Blue Lagoon generates significant revenue; community says it sees little of it.
- Closure lasts ten months before partial reopening in June 2023.
The Jamaica National Heritage Trust manages some of Jamaica’s most significant historical and natural sites. Its mandate is the preservation and management of the national heritage for the benefit of the Jamaican people. When the JNHT moved to restrict access to the Blue Lagoon in Portland in August 2022, citing concerns about safety, the sustainability of existing commercial arrangements, and the need to review the management framework for the site, the language was that of responsible stewardship.
The community of Portland — the parish’s residents, its tourism operators, the fisherfolk and boat operators who had for generations run their businesses from the lagoon’s edge — received it differently. To them, the closure looked less like heritage management and more like a decision being made about their community and their livelihoods without adequate consultation, by an agency based in Kingston, for reasons that remained insufficiently explained. The closure arrived without warning, effective immediately, with instructions that left the commercial operators who had been working at the site scrambling to understand what authority had been exercised over their arrangements.
The Revenue Question
Central to the community’s frustration was the question of who benefited from the Blue Lagoon’s substantial tourist traffic. The lagoon attracts visitors from across the world, and the boat rides, entry fees, and ancillary services associated with a visit generate significant revenue. The community’s contention was that the existing commercial arrangements directed the largest share of that revenue to private operators who had no deep connection to the Portland community, while the residents who lived with the consequences of heavy tourist traffic — the noise, the vehicles, the pressure on local roads and services — received minimal direct benefit.
This is, in various forms, a familiar complaint in heritage and natural tourism management. The sites that attract visitors are embedded in communities. The communities bear the costs of that visitation. The revenue flows to whoever controls the commercial operations, which is not always the community, and not always the state. The JNHT’s review of the Blue Lagoon’s management arrangements was, in principle, an opportunity to rebalance that equation. Whether the ten-month closure and the subsequent review produced a genuinely more equitable arrangement was a matter of continued debate after the lagoon’s reopening in June 2023.
The Beach Access Connection
The Blue Lagoon closure occurred against the backdrop of Jamaica’s escalating beach access debate and became connected to it in public perception, if not always in strict legal terms. The underlying issues were closely related: who controls access to Jamaica’s natural coastal assets, who benefits from that access, and what role the public interest should play in governing commercial arrangements at natural heritage sites. A community locked out of a lagoon it had always freely used was experiencing, in a different institutional context, precisely the same exclusion that communities around locked resort beaches experienced elsewhere.
That connection gave the Blue Lagoon story a resonance beyond Portland. It was understood, by advocates and by the public, as another instance of a pattern: the progressive restriction of Jamaicans’ access to the natural assets of their own island, in ways that benefited private or institutional interests over community ones. The fight to reopen the lagoon was, in this reading, not separate from the fight for beach access. It was the same fight, conducted at a different site.
Related: Latest Jamaica News | Property Market Analysis
Visit our YouTube Community ↗