NAME OF FEATURE | THE GLEANER | MONDAY, JANUARY 31, 2022 14 JAMAICA AT 60: MANCHESTER Paul H. Williams/Gleaner Writer WHEN PEOPLE local and overseas tourists visit Manchester, they do not go for the big resorts and sparkling white-sand beaches. Though the central Jamaica parish has several hotels and guest houses, people visit it mainly for its rustic charm and idyllic places. BRANDED THE ‘Home of Community Tourism’ by the International Institute for Peace through Tourism (IIPT), and pioneered by the late past director of tourismDesmond Henry and Diana McIntyre-Pike at the then Astra Country Inn in 1978, Manchester has many homestay accommodations. It is dotted with many picturesque villages and places, including Resource, CanoeValley and Alligator Pond in the south. God’s Well, Gut River and Alligator Hole are some of the points of interest in Canoe Valley, at the western end of which is Alligator Pond, the home of glittering black sands, the longest sand dune in the Caribbean, and the popular Little Ochie seafood restaurant. Other places of note are the yam capital, Christiana, in north Manchester; the historic Porus district, featuring Father Pam Pam Riverside Ranch; Prince Matthew Rastafarian organic farmexperience; Mandeville Fruits Gallery, which hosts the Manchester Community Tourism Centre; High Mountain Coffee Factory, Prospect Plantation, Roxborough, Skull Point, ‘Duppy Church’, Sun Valley Plantation and White River Valley. “The parish offers community lifestyle experiences where visitors can enjoy the natural lifestyle, including businesses and farms. There is more interest in community tourism from the Jamaica Tourist Board, so Manchester has a good opportunity to be an integral destination for tourism, featuring the many interesting villages located there,” McIntyre-Pike told The Gleaner. And, according to McIntyre-Pike, Manchester is a heritage parish which had seven hotels before the north coast became a tourist stamping ground. Two of such, the Mandeville Hotel and Villa Bella Christiana, are still in existence. She said the parish has three entities, the Manchester Parish Library, the Manchester Golf and Tennis Club, and the Manchester Horticultural Society, that are the oldest in the Western Hemisphere. Regarded a tourism stalwart in the last parish to be created in Jamaica (1814), McIntyre-Pike is the founder/president of the Countrystyle Community Tourism Network Villages as Businesses, which is based in Mandeville but operates throughout the island and internationally with the IIPT, and co-founder of theManchester Peace Coalition with the IIPT Caribbean. She introduced Mandeville to the IIPT, and Mandeville became the first IIPT Peace Town in the Caribbean, with the first Peace Park at Brooks Park. McIntyre-Pike said tourism stakeholders in the parish are marketing Manchester, especially Mandeville, as the homestay capital of Jamaica. Centrally located Manchester “is easier to market to local and international visitors seeking a cultural heritage experience”. She herself is “planning to specialise in the health and wellness market and the training of communities, together with the Manchester Peace Coalition, in health and wellness, which will include environmental management, security and COVID-19 protocols”. There was also a community tourism entrepreneurship hospitality five-day, US Embassy-sponsored training course at the Academy for Community Tourism, in partnership with the UWI Open Campus, which was implemented online last year from the UWI Mandeville Open Campus for 40 people. Packages can be designed for community lifestyle experiences, bearing inmind the client’s budget and interests. Specialinterest markets for tree watching, birdwatching, gravestones, general nature, etc, will also be revived. Before and after 1962, Manchester has not been a parish overrun by overseas visitors, as in the case of the north coast resort towns of Negril, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, and Port Antonio to a certain extent, and, according to McIntyre-Pike, “bearing in mind that there were seven hotels here before the north coast was developed”. That number has certainly been surpassed many times over. Yet, there is no known plan for the near or far future to transform the tourism landscape of this nature place into sprawling all-inclusive resorts, but there is much room to expand and improve the niche in which tourism in Manchester is cradled. Mandeville is the homestay capital of Jamaica – McIntyre-Pike Diana McIntyre-Pike File jamaica at PLACES OF HISTORICAL VALUE New Broughton United Church, an impressive early 19th-century cut-stone structure; St Mark’s Anglican, the parish church of Manchester (consecrated in 1820); Mandeville Courthouse (built in 1817); Maidstone district (founded 1840); Bloomfield Great House; Marlborough Great House; Marshall’s Pen Great House; Roxborough (bi r thplace of National Hero Norman Washington Manley); Kendal (site of 1957 train crash); Greenvale Railway and; Williamsfield Railway Station. MANCHESTER TRIVIA ANSWERS 1. West central 2. Middlesex 3. December 13, 1814 4. Vere, Clarendon and St Elizabeth 5. 339 6. Carpenter’s, May Day, and Don Figueroa mountains 7. July 1816 8. Governor of Jamaica William Montague, Duke of Manchester 9. August 27, 1816 10. Viscount of Mandeville, eldest son of the then governor of Jamaica 11. Caledonia 12. Charles Rowe 13. The Parsonage 14. True 15. To the left of the Mandeville Courthouse. 16. St Marks 17. Trelawny, St Elizabeth and Clarendon 18. Alligator Pond 19. Kendal 20. Mancunian
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