If you love warm, crystal-clear waters and watching the setting of the sun, there is no better place than Negril, Jamaica. It wins hands down for having the best beach on the island - perhaps the best in the Caribbean. This is where you let your hair down, or braid it. You shed your cares, your sense of time - and sometimes your swimming apparel. Negril gives new meaning to casual and laidback.
Negril is Jamaica's hippest, most casual resort, with the island's longest beach (perhaps it most beautiful),' numerous hotels, ecclectic accommodation and a buzzing nightlife.
Negril (population 3000), 52 miles west of Montego Bay, is Jamaica's fastest growing resort and the vortex around which Jamaica's fun-in-the-sun vacation life whirls. Tourism is Negril's only industry.
The village is so small, however, that hotel workers are drawn from miles around. Despite phenomenal growth in recent years, Negril, Jamaica is still more laid back than anywhere else in the island (it has the only public nude beach in Jamaica), and you are more likely to interact with locals here than in other resort areas.
Some well known hotel properties in Negril, Jamaica Rockhouse Hotel, Hidden Paradise Hotel, Legends Hotel, Samsara Hotel and Negril Inn and top end Hotel Resorts such as RIU, Couples and Superclubs. All in Jamaica, All n Negril offering the best in this resort town.
Besides these Negril hotel resorts there are other accommodations available along the West End cliffs. Budget to Top end lodging is available to suit all budgets.You can find lodging at a hostel, accommodation in a private home, or rent a small cabin for your vacation.
Negril boasts a dizzying kaleidoscope of hostelries. There's a good selection of budget properties and several places cater to campers.
Many of the hotels and restaurants are operated by foreigners and who arrived in the early days and fell under a spell from which theycould not escape. The tradition of cottages lingers, though they are no longer cheap. Most of the funky shacks have evolved into guest houses, and the guest houses into hotels, which continue to multiply. A strict building code has kept the resorts from growing taller than the tousled palm trees that rise majestically over the beach. South of the village , hotels continue to spread beyond the lighthouse where the gaps aregradually being filled in.
Negril, Jamaica has few guest houses. In general, beach properties are more expensive than hotels of equivalent standards in the West End. The most exclusive properties congregate at the northern end of Long Bay. Rates quoted are for summer.
The resort area of Negril stretches from Bloody Bay to the lighthouse. Bloody Bay, so named because of the butchering of whales in its waters a century ago, is the eastern end of a stretch of coastline that includes the longest continuous stretch of white sand beach in Jamaica, culminating in the rugged Lighthouse Road frontage.
Discovered in the 60s by North American "flower children", Negril has been known since then as the laid-back, do-your-own thing place to go. It is perfect today for nude and prude sun-bathing, snorkeling, sunfish-sailing and enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
Pictures of scenes from Negril seven mile beach
It's remarkable to think that only two decades ago you could walk a mile on the beach without chancing upon Man Friday footprints. What a pleasure it was to arrive in Negril in the mid-1970's, before the world had discovered this then-remote, sensual Eden. For one buck a night, you could sleep in a Rastafarian's hut beside the jungled shoreline, aided in slumber by thick clouds of ganja and the 'cheep-cheep' of geckos that call from the eaves. Back then Negril was an off-the-beaten track haven: nirvana to the budget-minded, beach-loving crowd. It was a 'far out" setting where you could drool over sunsets of 'hallucinogenic' intensity that had nothing to do with the 'magic' mushrooms that still show up in omelettes and teas.
Negril, Jamaica is basically a one-street town divided in tow by the South Negril River, with Long Bay to the north and West End to the south. The apex is Negril Village, which lies immediately south of the river and is centered on a small roundabout from which Norman Manley Boulevard leads north, West End Road leads south, and Sheffield Road goes east and becomes the A", then leads to Savanna-la-Mar, 19 miles away.
Long Bay Negril and its blindingly white, 7 mile long beach fringed by sea grapes and palms stretches north form the South Negril River. Long Bay is paralleled by Norman Manley Boulevard, a two-lane highway about 100 yards inland of the beach. Be careful when walking the road; traffic whips past pell-nell. The road is lined with hotels, restaurants, and food shacks for almost its entire length, except for a half-mile section toward its northern end that has been set aside as the Long Bay Beach Park.
Pictures of Island Sunshine Plaza, Margaritaville and Time Shopping Area
Negril Village consists of two shopping plazas and a handful of banks and other commercial ventures, plus a few score of houses and wood-and-tin shack that lie dispersed among the forested hills behind an area known as Red Ground. There is no town of Negril to speak of. The plazas (Coral Seas Plaza and Negril Plaza) lie immediately south of the round-about and are fronted by Negril Square, a parking lot where taxis and touts hang out. Two other shopping plazas (king's Plaza and Sunshine Village) and the A Fi Wi Plaza Craft market (also called Negril Vendors Plaza) lie 200 yards on West End Road.
The Shell Gas station, public health clinic, police station, market with stalls, and taxis and buses line Sheffield Road which at day's end is thronged with honking traffic and hotel staff jostling for space on the buses.
West End is a rocky limestone plateau rises south of South Negril River and extends out for several miles. The area is known as the West End or 'the Rock' and it plays second fiddle to the beach. The coral cliff top is indented with coves good for swimming in 15 feet of crystal-clear azure waters, providing a dramatic setting for dozens of small hotels and cottages, and restaurants built atop the rock face, which was the setting for scenes from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Papillion, and Dr. No. You'll find pocket-size beaches at the northern end where fishing boats are drawn up, but swimming is not recommended.
