St. James Parish

St. James hosts Montego Bay, Jamaica's second city and tourism capital where over half the local economy depends on visitor arrivals. The parish epitomizes tourism-dependent development—cruise ships, all-inclusive resorts, duty-free shopping, and airport infrastructure creating employment that dominates the regional labor market while exposing the economy to external shocks.

Hurricane Melissa's October 2025 impact tested this tourism dependence, the Category-5 storm disrupting arrivals that the local economy requires. The rapid recovery—cruise ships returning within weeks, hotels reopening by mid-December—demonstrates both infrastructure resilience and the imperative that tourism dependence creates for rapid restoration. The Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce celebrated the speed of recovery as near-record achievement.

The parish's tourism infrastructure—cruise port, Sangster International Airport, resort strips—represents decades of investment that alternative industries cannot match. Whether Montego Bay's tourism concentration provides sustainable prosperity—or whether climate change increases hurricane frequency and severity beyond the recovery capacity demonstrated in 2025—tests the long-term viability of tourism-centric economic strategy.