The Blue and John Crow Mountains: Nature’s treasure

In the hush before dawn, the Blue and John Crow Mountains wear their mist like a benediction. Here, ridgelines cradle stories of resistance, healing, and everyday wonder etched into forest and stone. In 2015, this rugged massif became Jamaica’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, honoured for both its biodiversity and its Maroon heritage, proving that nature and culture are inseparable.

Along the Nanny Town Heritage Route, the Windward Maroons once moved like breath through cloud, carving footpaths, viewpoints, and hideaways that still whisper of courage and sovereignty won in the 1730s treaties. In these same heights, Holywell opens like a green amphitheatre above Kingston, an easy gateway to misty forest, birdsong, and the small waterfall that reminds us how patience shapes stone. From here, trails reach towards Portland Gap and the Blue Mountain Peak Track, where dawn breaks at 2,256 metres and a whole island unfurls at your feet.

GARDENS

History sits in the gardens, too. Cinchona Botanical Gardens, established in 1868, once cultivated the bark that yielded quinine, the medicine that tamed fevers across empires. Today, it remains a cool perch above St Andrew, a living archive of resilience. And over these slopes, coffee took root after 1728 seedlings brought by Governor Sir Nicholas Lawes, eventually giving the world the mellow, mist-born clarity of Blue Mountain coffee.

Look west and the island’s geology shifts into another register of awe: Cockpit Country, type locality of cockpit karst, thousands of green domes and star-shaped valleys, a labyrinth of caves and underground rivers. It is both refuge and reservoir, a heartland of biodiversity and Maroon memory, reminding us that the island’s centre hums with its pulse.

What, then, do these ranges teach? That answers seldom shout. They reveal themselves when we “take time to explore the simple beauties of nature”. In the blue hush, doubts soften; on a sunlit ridge, hopelessness loosens its grip. The mountains insist that we move slowly enough to notice: the flash of a tody in lichened shade, a fern uncurling, the way mist becomes rain becomes river becomes sea. The secret of life is not hidden beyond us. It is beneath our boots, in the breath between heartbeats, in the patient work of mountains turning weather into wisdom.

Contributed by Dr Lorenzo Gordon, a diabetologist, internal medicine consultant, biochemist, and a history and heritage enthusiast. Send feedback to inspiring876@gmail.com.