The beach that a doctor made famous by swimming in it

Doctor's Cave is the beach most visitors picture when they picture Montego Bay: a sheltered crescent of white sand off Gloucester Avenue, with water clear enough to see your own feet in.

The name confuses people, because there is no cave to speak of now. The land was given over for bathing in the early 1900s by Dr. Alexander James McCatty, and a cave once gave access down to the sand. The cave is gone — the usual account is that a hurricane in the 1930s took it — but the doctor's name stuck to the beach.

Its fame came from a different doctor. In the 1920s the British osteopath Sir Herbert Barker swam here and afterwards described the water as having healing properties. He was well known in Britain at the time, and the claim travelled. People began arriving to bathe in water that was supposed to cure them, and Montego Bay's life as a resort town effectively started there.

Treat the curative part as a story rather than medicine. What is true is that the reef just offshore keeps the water calm and unusually clear, which is why the beach has been in continuous use for over a century.

It is a private club beach, so there is an entrance fee, and it has the things that come with that — loungers, umbrellas, changing rooms, somewhere to buy lunch. If you want it quiet, go early. By midday in winter, when the ships are in, it fills.