Bartlett unveils plan to reimagine Montego Bay to Falmouth coastal corridor

WESTERN BUREAU:

Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett says high-level consultations are now taking place with local and international architects to transform the coastal corridor from the Montego Bay cruise ship terminal to Falmouth as part of the effort to reposition Montego Bay as the Caribbean’s most significant tourism destination.

Addressing an event on Wednesday to celebrate Montego Bay’s achievements and resilience, Bartlett told tourism and business stakeholders that the city’s waterfront redevelopment will redefine how visitors experience the city, the coastline, and its surrounding communities.

Bartlett revealed that high-level consultations are already taking place with international architects to develop the plans to transform the coastal corridor into a continuous experiential tourism corridor.

“I meet with one of the most celebrated architects in the world, who is a Jamaican, to discuss the thoughts and ideas of reimagining from the cruise ship terminal right through the waterfront and extending it all the way to Falmouth [Trelawny],” Bartlett explained.

He said the redevelopment is aligned with Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness’s charge for a “new Jamaica”, emerging after recent global and climate-related shocks, including Hurricane Melissa.

According to Bartlett, the waterfront project goes beyond physical infrastructure and he stressed that it will integrate communities, culture and commerce into a circular tourism economy.

“The design we’re discussing is the effect of a circular economy in motion, where tourism will feed into the communities around and the communities feed back into tourism,” he said.

Despite the impact of Hurricane Melissa, which left significant damage to tourism assets in western Jamaica, Bartlett said the waterfront vision reflects confidence rather than retreat.

COMING BACK BIGGER AND BETTER

“Only 42 per cent of our assets in Montego Bay, in terms of hotel rooms, are intact at the moment. Just understand what we’re doing. We are coming back with a bigger, better, more exciting experiential tourism,” he said.

Bartlett further insisted that the scale and quality of the planned redevelopment will eclipse competing destinations across linguistic and cultural divides in the region.

“There will be no single destination within the Caribbean, the English-speaking, Spanish, French or Dutch, that will have the kind and quality of product that Montego Bay will have when we are finished,” he said.

Bartlett added that the corridor will incorporate new mega-hotels in the Rose Hall area – a casino crescent, which he has described as “the first-ever tourism innovation township in the entire world”.

In keeping with the bold plans for tourism, Bartlett made a call to Jamaicans to seize the economic opportunities created by the redevelopment, saying long-term tourism wealth lies beyond hotel ownership.

“The essence of tourism is not about hotels. It is the experiences that the visitors consume,” he said, while urging greater local participation in food supply, entertainment, transport and cultural production.

albert.ferguson@gleanerjm.com