🇯🇲
Jamaica
Let's explore one of the world's most fascinating countries — packed with surprises, stories, and pen pal potential.
The Basics
3 Things That Will Blow Your Mind
Genuinely. You'll want to tell someone immediately.
A country of under 3 million people dominates world sprinting
Usain Bolt set 8 world records including the 100m and 200m records that still stand today. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has won more World Championship sprint titles than any other woman in history. Jamaica consistently produces more world-class sprinters per capita than any other country and nobody has a complete explanation for why.
Jamaica sent a bobsled team to the 1988 Winter Olympics having never trained on ice
Jamaica had no bobsled tradition, no ice to practice on, and no equipment of their own and had to borrow a sled. They qualified because the rules at the time allowed it. They crashed on their final run but the crowd gave them a standing ovation because everyone in the arena knew what they had done. The film Cool Runnings was made about them and has been watched by more people than there are Jamaicans.
Blue Mountain coffee is so prized that Japan buys most of it
The Blue Mountains above Kingston are almost permanently wrapped in mist and cloud and the cool damp conditions produce coffee beans considered among the finest in the world. A single kilogram can cost over £50 at retail. Japan imports approximately 70% of all Blue Mountain coffee produced every year and has done so for decades, which means most of it never leaves Asia.
Famous For
Sprinting
Usain Bolt, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Yohan Blake, Veronica Campbell-Brown — Jamaica has produced more world-class sprinters from a single small island than almost any country on Earth. Track and field is the national sport in all but name.
Reggae and Bob Marley
Reggae music was born in Kingston in the late 1960s and Bob Marley became one of the best-selling musicians in history. His songs are still played in almost every country in the world every single day and his face is one of the most printed images on T-shirts globally.
Jerk Cooking
Jerk is a specific Jamaican cooking method involving a dry rub of scotch bonnet peppers, allspice, and other spices and then slow cooking over pimento wood. The tradition comes from the Maroons, escaped enslaved people who developed it in the mountains. What most of the world calls jerk seasoning is a distant approximation of the real thing.
Blue Mountain Coffee
Grown in mountains that are almost always hidden in cloud, Blue Mountain coffee is among the most expensive in the world and Japan considers it so exceptional that it buys the majority of the annual harvest every year.
Did You Know?
The Jamaican flag is the only national flag in the world that contains neither red, white, nor blue. It is black, green, and gold. When Jamaica became independent in 1962, they deliberately chose colours that no other Caribbean country was using so the flag would be immediately recognisable from a distance at sea.
Pen Pal Connection
A child in Jamaica might write to you about a track meet they ran in and what it feels like to race in a country where sprinting is basically a national religion, the music coming out of every house and minibus on a Saturday, a patty from the local bakery which is not the same as any pastry anywhere else in the world, or the fact that the bobsled team their grandparents watched in 1988 is still the most famous thing about their country even though Jamaica is the fastest sprinting nation on Earth.