Jamaica

Port Antonio sits on Jamaica's northeast coast, a couple of hours' drive from the resort towns most visitors know — Montego Bay, Ocho Rios — and for most of its history it was known for one thing: bananas. The United Fruit Company built the town's grand Titchfield Hotel here in the 1890s to serve the trade. For decades afterward, Port Antonio stayed a working port rather than a tourist destination.

That changed, more or less by accident, in the late 1940s, when Errol Flynn's schooner the Zaca put in at the harbour after bad weather. Flynn liked what he found enough to stay, and over the following decade he turned a sleepy banana port into one of the era's most talked-about celebrity hideaways, simply by being Errol Flynn and living there.

Flynn bought Navy Island, the 64-acre island guarding the harbour entrance, and moored the Zaca offshore. He never built a proper house there — just a thatched structure built around an existing tree — but a row of royal palms he planted reportedly still stands. It is worth being honest about Navy Island's condition today: it is closed to the public, owned by the Jamaican Port Authority, and its old resort buildings have fallen into ruin. It is a striking thing to look at from the water, but not currently a place you can visit.

Two things tie present-day Port Antonio directly back to the Flynn years. The Errol Flynn Marina, renamed in his honour in 2009, is a genuine working harbour today with berths for visiting yachts and full customs facilities — the one Flynn-named landmark that is straightforwardly open and operating. And on the cliffs near Navy Island stands the Trident Hotel, which opened during the years Flynn was putting this stretch of coast on the map. It was never his property, but it belongs unmistakably to the same moment.