Hope Gardens is free, open from 6am, and the largest green space in the Kingston metropolitan area. It is also a sugar estate with its paperwork intact, which means you can read the exact sum the British government paid its owner for 379 enslaved people, then go and stand under the aqueduct they built.
History
Major Hope and the 1655 invasion
In May 1655 an English fleet under Penn and Venables took Jamaica from Spain. Officers who served were paid in land. One of them, Major Richard Hope, received a grant in the plain below the Blue Mountains, and the estate carried his surname from then on. That is where the name comes from. Not the emotion, a man.
The sugar estate and the aqueduct
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Hope was a working sugar estate. Mills need power, and the Hope River runs close by. In 1752 a private bill allowed Thomas Hope Elletson to take enough water from the river to turn mills for grinding cane, and construction followed. A plaque at the end of the structure reads Hope Aqueduct A.D. 1758.
It is brick and cut stone, a channel carried on columns with arches between them. It was cut, hauled and raised by enslaved Africans, because on a Jamaican sugar estate in 1758 there was no other workforce. Sections still stand inside Hope Gardens and along Mona Road and through the University of the West Indies campus at Mona. The Jamaica National Heritage Trust declared it a national monument on 6 January 2005. From 1766 the Hope waterworks also supplied Kingston, so the city drank from it.
The receipt
This is the part most guides skip. In the nineteenth century Hope Estate passed through a marriage settlement dated 11 May 1819 to the family of Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos. When Britain abolished slavery it did not compensate the enslaved. It compensated the owners. University College London's Legacies of British Slavery database records the claim as Jamaica St Andrew 114, Hope Estate, dated 25 July 1836: 379 enslaved people, £6,630 5s 6d awarded, paid to the settlement trustees. The claim was contested.
You can look at the number, the shillings and the pence. There is no version of this history in which the aqueduct is just picturesque brickwork.
Becoming a botanic garden
In 1873 the colonial government took about 200 acres of the estate and turned it into a botanical establishment, closely tied to Kew in London, for plant experiment and instruction before it opened as a public garden. It became headquarters of the Department of Botanical Gardens and Plantations in 1898, and of the Department of Agriculture in 1908.
In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II visited during her Coronation tour and granted the gardens the style "Royal", described as the first such designation for any public garden or park in the region in many years. The property, now around 237 acres and still government owned, was leased to the Nature Preservation Foundation in 2004.
The walled Chinese Garden was built and given to Jamaica by the government of the People's Republic of China, marking fifty years of independence and forty years of diplomatic relations, and opened on 19 August 2015. The Peace Garden, with a stone maze, followed in 2019.
What it costs and when it opens
The gardens are free and open every day, roughly 6am to 6pm. Parking is around J$200 for a car, well under US$2.
Two things inside charge separately. The Chinese Garden is about J$200 for Jamaican adults and around US$5 or J$600 for visitors, children less. Hope Zoo is run by its own foundation: roughly J$1,500 for adults 12 and over, J$1,000 for children 2 to 11 and seniors, under twos free, so under US$10 a head. Confirm the zoo's hours before building a plan around it, because they are shorter than the gardens'.
What it is actually like
Large, green, quiet on weekday mornings, and completely taken over on Sundays and public holidays by Kingston families with coolers. The Sunken Garden is the prettiest corner and is booked for weddings most weekends. The wider lawns are unshaded and the midday sun is serious.
The aqueduct is not signposted like an exhibit. Ask a groundsman where the arches are, or look for the run of brick columns towards the boundary. Most visitors walk past it without knowing what it is.
What to bring
- Water, more than you think, and a hat. Shade is patchy.
- Cash in Jamaican dollars for parking, the Chinese Garden and the rides.
- Shoes you can walk grass and gravel in.
How it fits a day
Hope Gardens sits at the top of Old Hope Road, about ten minutes north of the Bob Marley Museum and fifteen from Devon House on a good run. YaadBinge normally puts it first, from around 7am to 9am, when it is cool and empty, then drops down Hope Road for the museum at 9.30am.
The other workable slot is late afternoon, around 4pm to 6pm, coming down from the Blue Mountains, since the gardens sit on the road between the hills and the city. Allow 60 to 90 minutes, or two and a half hours if you are adding the zoo with children.
