Interior highlands

Interior highlands

Cockpit Country is located in Jamaica's interior highlands. The area is characterized by steep-sided depressions, sometimes 120 meters deep, separated by conical hills and ridges. At the end of the seventeenth century, Cockpit Country was a refuge for Jamaican Maroons fleeing slavery. The shallow caves, which the locals call "cockpits", are especially common around the village of Quick Step, with a density of up to 15 caves per km2. Among the notable caves are the Marta Tick Cave and Minocal's Glory Hole. Cockpit Country is the largest remaining contiguous rainforest in Jamaica. To preserve the area as a national park, an unpublished paper in 1979 recommended its preservation, and in 1994 geographer Alan Eyre proposed that Cockpit Country be designated a World Heritage Site to preserve its environment. In 2006, a petition to protect the area was presented to Prime Minister Bruce Golding. A small, critically endangered species of frog, the Eleutherodactylus sisyphodemus, is known only from Cockpit Country, which is home to 90% of the global population of the Jamaican endemic parrot, the Black-Billed Amazon. The area is also home to the Jamaican Swallowtail, the Western Hemisphere's largest butterfly. This is one of the last remaining habitats of the species.