Montego Bay
capital of Saint James Parish, Jamaica
Montego Bay (Jamaican Patois: Mobay or Muhbay) is the capital of the parish of St. James in Jamaica. The city is the fourth most populous urban area in the country, after Kingston, Spanish Town, and Portmore, all of which form the Greater Kingston Metropolitan Area, home to more than half a million people. As a result, Montego Bay is the second-largest anglophone city in the Caribbean, after Kingston.
Montego Bay is a popular tourist destination featuring duty-free shopping, a cruise line terminal and several beaches and resorts. The city is served by the Donald Sangster International Airport, the busiest airport in the Anglophone Caribbean, which is located within the official city limits. The city is enclosed in a watershed, drained by several rivers such as the Montego River. Montego Bay is referred to as "The Second City", "MoBay" or "Bay".
Toponymy
Christopher Columbus named the bay of Montego, Golfo de Buen Tiempo ("Fair Weather Gulf"). The name "Montego Bay" is believed to have originated as a corruption of the Spanish word manteca ("lard"), allegedly because during the Spanish period it was the port where lard, leather and beef were exported.
“Montego Bay” enters the record as capital of Saint James Parish, Jamaica. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Montego, capital and Saint can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q637555. VIAF identifies the subject as 151300496. The Library of Congress control number is n82222827. Authority coordinates are 18.467, -77.917. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Montego Bay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.