Montego Bay

Spanish colonizers arrived in Jamaica in 1494 and quickly set up the western bay as a point of trade. The land around it was well suited for cattle and hogs, and the fat rendered from those animals became the bay's primary export. By the mid-1500s, Spanish cartographers were calling it Bahía de Manteca, the Bay of Lard.

When English forces under Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables seized Jamaica in 1655, they inherited Spanish place names they could not always pronounce cleanly. Manteca posed no small difficulty for English tongues. Over decades of use, the syllables shifted, the stress moved, and manteca drifted toward the English ear as montego.

The bay's importance grew under English rule, not because of lard but because of sugar. Plantation estates in the western parishes funneled their output through Montego Bay's port, and by the 18th century it rivaled Kingston in commercial weight. The name, now thoroughly anglicized, was formally fixed in colonial maps by the 1700s.

Jamaican independence in 1962 did not change the name. Montego Bay became a city and eventually the capital of Saint James Parish. Today it holds Jamaica's main international airport, and most travelers who land there have no idea they are descending into a bay once famous for rendered pig fat.