Holiday Jamaica

Overview

The Seville Great House is located in the most historically significant area of Jamaica. The land on which it sits encompasses thousands of years of the island's history, having been occupied years before the "new world" was discovered.

It contains the remains of Maima, an indigenous Taino village that Christopher Columbus encountered upon first landing in Jamaica in 1494. It was the first 16th century Spanish settlement in Jamaica, called Sevilla la Nueva (New Seville), the first capital of Jamaica under Spanish rule, one of the first sites in the region to receive a steady flow of African slaves and the location of the post-1655 British sugar plantation known as Seville.

Today, the Great House, is the center point of the Seville Heritage Park, home to a museum showing an interpretive exhibition of the property's history from the earliest evidence of human presence in the area, about A.D. 650, to the beginning of the twentieth century. The 300 acre park, owned by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, is located on the north coast of the island approximately 1.25 miles west of the town center of St. Ann's Bay and about 5 miles west of Ocho Rios.

Internationally, the park is considered a important microcosm of the lifestyle of an indigenous people and the transformative years brought about by colonization, slavery and sugar to Jamaica and the the Americas. It is listed as "tentative", on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list, an inventory of properties that each State Party intends to consider for nomination.