![]() ![]() I’m en route, and the midday sun is high when I see a roadside marker that reads “Negril: Capital of Casual”. To reach the Caves, it’s an 80-minute coastal drive west from Montego Bay’s airport. It’s an enticing location because of its history, its labyrinth of underground limestone caves and honeycomb-like cliffs, and the activity for which it’s best known: cliff jumping. And at the western tip of the island lies the Caves, a resort sequestered behind high rock fences with 10 acres of coastline. There is Strawberry Hill, a 26-acre inland retreat located near Kingston, embedded in the Blue Mountains, almost 1,000 metres above sea level. There is GoldenEye, so named by its original owner Ian Fleming, who wrote many James Bond novels in its main house. In his Island Records days, Blackwell was known for his shrewd selection of talent and keeping the label at a manageable size today, the 76-year-old applies these values to his Caribbean establishments. In the early 1990s, he owned properties in Miami’s South Beach, and not long after began his pre-eminent Island Outpost collection, a network of luxe hotels and villas in Jamaica, all unique and infused with the island’s laid-back touch. He sold Island in 1989 to PolyGram and had a completely new venture in mind. Cat Stevens, U2, and Roxy Music were all Island artists, and Blackwell’s golden touch proved catalytic for their careers. I like to think of Island as a very classy delicatessen,” Blackwell once said of his label, which he named after both Alec Waugh’s novel Island in the Sun and Harry Belafonte’s eponymous calypso tune. And then there’s another man who helped forge reggae’s trail around the world: London-born, Jamaica-raised music producer Chris Blackwell, who in 1972 signed the then largely unknown Bob Marley and the Wailers to his Island Records label, deftly altering the course of musical history. ![]() The genre known as reggae is still largely a secret to ears outside the Caribbean, but a movement has been brewing, with one man about to turn the world onto the reggae beat: Nesta Robert Marley, born in Nine Miles, Jamaica, in 1945. The Who and Pink Floyd bellow from radios, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Diamond spin on turntables. In celebratory style, the year begins on a Saturday, and the musical landscape is loud with waves of rock and disco. While you’re there, make a point to go spear fishing or snorkeling, but don’t miss out on the resort’s main draw: the candlelit grotto, where romantic meals are lit by enough votive candles to worry a firefighter.Let’s imagine for a moment that it is 1972. The dive isn't for the faint of heart-but you can chase the adrenaline rush with an American- or Jamaican-style breakfast of sweet banana pancakes or savory ackee and saltfish under a thatched-roof gazebo braced by periwinkle pillars, and take your regionally inspired main meals, like saffron crabcakes with tomato salsa, at the airy, lilac-walled dining-hall under a portrait of the island’s godfather, Bob Marley. that is, until you take a morning dip off a cliff. Rooms are breezy but refined, with vaulted ceilings, handcrafted wood furnishings, and cherry red and royal blue batik prints that signal a slower island pace. Accommodations range from one- and two-bedroom stone cottages to suites and a splurge-worthy four-bedroom villa, aptly named Clandestino, that’s buried deep in the jungle. Nestled cliffside in Negril, Jamaica, the all-inclusive Caves are forged from a limestone headland near an historic lighthouse, with 11 thatched-roof dwellings that seem to rise from the surrounding rock beds like some mythical village. ![]()
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