Daviot Kelly, Staff Reporter

The unfinished Craft Village in Carder Park, Port Antonio. Although it is unfinished, the village can still accommodate some vendors. - photo by Paul-André Walker

There have been many plans over the years to revive Portland as a tourist destination. They have included the improvement of major attractions; the erection of appropriate signs at major entrances to the towns, roadways and places of interest, as well as the creation of marketing material to promote those attractions.

The craft village should have been another attraction, not just for craft producers and traders, but also for other retailers. Opposite Carder Park, the Allan Avenue-based village is right by the shore but today, remains incomplete.

Recently, the Portland Parish Council received $2 million to assist with repairing the abandoned village. The village is to house, at least temporarily, vendors who are now at the Musgrave market. According to Port Antonio's Mayor Floyd Patterson. Some 45 craft vendors will be housed at the facility, with the remainder to be transferred to Oliver Park - where a building is to be erected.

According to the Mayor, other vendors who sell clothes, agricultural produce and meats, will also be housed at Oliver Park.

Until then, the craft village is empty; a fine structure going to waste. Money is not a problem, but getting the vendors to move to the new facility, is not so simple.The vendors, as was the case when the idea of the craft village was first envisaged, refuse to move.

Joy and Rasta Dawn, who sell clothes and cultural items respectively in a lane beside the Portland Parish Library, tell the same tale as their craft brethren.

Fact of the matter

"The whole fact of the matter is that we comfortable right yah so," says Rasta Dawn.

According to the duo, the positioning of the market is very important. As it stands, they explained, they were having a hard time with the fact that tourists and local shoppers alike gravitate towards shops that are closer to the front of the town.

To make matters worse, the two, very colourful in dress and speech, say the decline of tourism has hit them hard.

Cruise ship

They say the last time they saw a cruise ship in the town was back in 2002 and joked that the only yachts they have spotted belong to prominent Jamaican businessmen.

Joy, a vendor, points to the distance of the unfinished village from the heart of the town where the Asian-run businesses thrive by attracting customers they used to have. As far as she is concerned, moving to a location even further away from where they are now, an already tough situation, would make survival impossible. "If we go way up there, what's gonna gwaan?," she asks.