Green Castle Estate

Green Castle Estate (contact property manager Angie Dickson for reservations, cell tel. 876/881-6293, or U.S. tel. 612/986-4709, angie@gcjamaica.com, www.gcjamaica.com or www.greencastletropicalstudycenter.org) is a 650-hectare farm producing a mix of fruit and--above all in terms of revenue--orchids, which today fill four large shade houses. Named after the Irish holdings of one of its earlier owners, several archaeological finds on the property indicate it has been continuously lived on since the time of the Tainos. Early English settlement at Green Castle left the iconic windmill that still stands today. Land use has changed from cassava cultivation under the Tainos and Spanish to orange, cotton, pimento, cacao, indigo, sugarcane, and then bananas. For centuries the estate was connected with the rest of Jamaica only by sea. After years of British and then American ownership fraught with frequent mortgage defaults and border disputes, the property ended up in the hands of one of the world's foremost agricultural families and majority-share owners of Cargill, still the largest private company in the United States. Since the 1950s the farm has grown an increasingly diverse mix of fruit crops; it more recently went into organic fruit production and became one of Jamaica's foremost orchid farms, now supplying a large portion of domestic demand. Current ownership is with an English developer who intends to add ecotourism into Green Castle's mix. Historical sites on the expansive estate include excavated Taino middens (1300), a militia barracks (1834), and the signature coral stone windmill tower (1700).

A variety of tours are offered on Green Castle Estate, all of them excellent values. Children always pay half-price. The Estate Tour (US$20) introduces visitors to some of the 120 hectares of certified-organic tree crops planted on the farm. No other farm in Jamaica has more certified organic hectares under cultivation, and the organic coconut oil operation is one of the farm's more important products and a central focus of the tour. Visitors also learn about the roughly 2,000 organic pimento (allspice) trees and cocoa trees organically grown on the farm. Pedigree beef production is also a major activity, with hundreds of head of cattle roaming around the rolling grassy hills. The tour concludes with a visit to the orchid propagation shade houses, where visitors are dazzled with 50,000 orchid plants of several varieties and taught the basics of one of the island's most important orchid operations.