INSPIRING JAMAICA - Seville’s silent stones still speak

Tucked along the north coast in St Ann, where the Caribbean Sea laps gently at the shore, lies a 300-acre expanse that holds more Jamaican history per square foot than almost anywhere else on the island. Seville Heritage Park is not just a scenic stretch of green, it is the very ground where Jamaica’s recorded story began.

It was here, in 1509, that Spanish colonisers established Sevilla la Nueva, the first European settlement on the island, following Christopher Columbus’s earlier landing nearby in 1494. But, long before the Spanish arrived, this same land was home to the Taíno people, whose villages, artifacts, and way of life have been unearthed by archaeologists working the site for decades. Layer upon layer, the soil at Seville tells a continuous story of Taíno settlement, Spanish conquest, and later, under British rule, a sprawling sugar plantation worked by enslaved Africans whose labour built the wealth of empires while their spirit built the foundation of Jamaican culture itself.

Today, Seville Heritage Park stands as a living museum. Visitors can walk among the ruins of a Spanish fort and sugar works, view an aqueduct that once powered the estate, and explore exhibits that trace four distinct peoples, Taíno, Spanish, British, and African, whose fates intertwined on this single piece of land. Declared a National Heritage Site and now on Jamaica’s Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage status, Seville is more than a tourist stop. It is a place of reckoning, remembrance, and resilience.

Each May, the park comes alive during Jamaica Heritage Week, when drumming, storytelling, and craft demonstrations connect present-day Jamaicans to the ancestors who walked that same earth in chains and yet still found ways to preserve language, rhythm, faith, and food traditions that flourish across the island today.

Standing among Seville’s ruins, one cannot help but feel the weight and the triumph of survival. Our ancestors endured the unimaginable, yet, from that suffering rose a culture so vibrant it now echoes across the globe through our music, our food, our faith, and our fearless spirit.

Be guided by your past and use the experiences to propel you to the liberation of your mind and spirit. You are the force and driver of the present and future.

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