Ocho Rios was originally settled by a tribe of
Arawak called
Taíno, who had settled in
Jamaica around 1,000 BCE and called the land Xamayca, meaning land of wood and water. After
Christopher Columbus landed in 1494 and claimed the island for
Spain, Ocho Rios was named Las Chorreras, meaning rapid rivers. The Taínos were ultimately obliterated by disease, slavery, and war. Some also committed suicide, presumably to escape their conditions as slaves. Spain
brought the first enslaved Africans to Jamaica in 1517, to work on plantations throughout Jamaica, including Ocho Rios. In May 1655, British forces seized the island from the Spanish. The English misunderstood, misinterpreted, and mispronounced the Spanish name Chorreras and called the town Ocho Rios, which sounded close enough. In 1657 and 1658 the Spanish, sailing from
Cuba, failed to retake the island in fierce battles in and around Ocho Rios known as the
Battle of Las Chorreras. Historically, Ocho Rios did not have any prominent role to either the English or the Spanish. It was, however, utilised by pirates who along with Port Royal, regarded it as a perfect base of operations. When slavery was officially abolished on Jamaica in the year of 1834, the town entered a period of poverty and rebirth. With colonial interests removed, the history of Ocho Rios was crafted by the newly-freed slaves, who embraced their new-found freedom and slowly turned the town into a stable and peaceful fishing village. Although plantations developed during colonial times, Ocho Rios never evolved as a fruit-shipping port of any consequence. Things began to change in the 1940s when Reynolds Jamaica Mines built the deep-water Reynolds Pier west of town. An overhead conveyor belt exists 10 km from the Reynolds open-cast mines at Lydford, in the hills south of town. Nonetheless, Ocho Rios was still just a quiet village in the 1960s, when the Jamaican government formed the St Ann Development Company (SADCo), under the direction of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), and then began systematic development. It dredged the harbor and built a small marina, reclaimed the shore, brought in sand for Turtle Beach, and built shopping and housing complexes. In January and February 1967,
Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in Ocho Rios, with wife
Coretta and two employees, to draft his fourth and final book,
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?. By the early 1980s, Ocho Rios' character had been established: a meld of American-style fast-food franchises, nondescript shopping malls, an enclave of small hotels in town, and more upscale hotels a discrete distance east. The construction of Island Village, a major shopping and entertainment complex, has spruced up 'Ochi.' In 1968, the Jamaica Villa Association (JAVA) was created to represent the growing number of villas in Jamaica. Ocho Rios has seen the rise of luxury villas, with beachfront, ocean, and mountain views. Today, Ocho Rios extends between
Dunn's River Falls, to the west of the town centre, and the
White River, to the east. Almost all the development outside the centre is to the east. ==In popular culture==