Portmore
—  City  —
Nickname(s): The Sunshine City
Portmore
Coordinates: 17°57′00″N 76°52′48″W / 17.9499936°N 76.879921°W / 17.9499936; -76.879921Coordinates: 17°57′00″N 76°52′48″W / 17.9499936°N 76.879921°W / 17.9499936; -76.879921
Country	Jamaica
County	Middlesex
Parish	St Catherine
Founded	1960s
Municipalities Act grants municipal status[1]	2003-05
Population[citation needed]
• Estimate (2005)	166,845
Time zone	EST (UTC-5)
Area code(s)	+1876
Website	portmore.info portmore.com

Portmore is a coastal city in southern Jamaica in Saint Catherine, and a dormitory town for the neighbouring cities of Kingston and Spanish Town.

Geography[link]

Portmore is built on a generally flat plain facing the Kingston Harbour with an intricate canal system which prevents flooding.^[2] Much of the land is reclaimed swamp.^[2] The Port Henderson hill, apart from the Salt pond hill is visible from neighbouring parishes and was a possible Arawak grave site. Because the Arawak buried their dead in caverns, which Port Henderson hill is riddled with. The most famous cave is named "Twin Sisters"^[2]

History[link]

Portmore began as a large area for schematic residential development in the late 1960s,^[2] as the WIHCON organization built thousands of prototype housing units in an effort to alleviate the over-population of Kingston; the first was called Independence City.^[2] It has since grown into a suburban city to Kingston; its large population travels into Kingston daily for work, schooling, and many other essential services via the Portmore toll road.

Portmore was granted Municipality status in 2003,^[1] and has its own City Council and Mayor, following the British-based model of Jamaican local government.^[1] It now houses approximately 10% of the population of the Kingston Corporate Area.

Currently George Lee is Portmore's mayor since 2012.

Economy[link]

While Portmore is not marketed as a tourist destination for the millions of incoming travellers to Jamaica every year, there are many places for entertainment, eating, relaxing and enjoyment such beaches, restaurants, hotels and much more. Portmore is a safe place to live.

Transportation[link]

Portmore is served by JUTC (Jamaica Urban Transport Company) which provides bus transportation for Portmore residents both locally and into Kingston and Spanish Town.

The Portmore Toll Road is the major commuter Highway which connects the two cities of Kingston and Portmore via the Hunts Bay Bridge, and Portmore to the old capital of Spanish Town with three lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 110 kilometres per hour (68 mph)

The city is served by the Norman Manley International Airport with over 130 flights weekly..

Sport[link]

Portmore has a professional soccer team that plays in the Jamaican National Premier League. It was originally Hazard United from May Pen but following its relocation is now called Portmore United F.C..

Horse Racing is popular and all major horse races are run at Caymanas Park located in north Portmore.

Neighbourhoods and districts[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Bernard Lodge Braeton Bridgeport Caribbean Estates Cumberland Cumberland Meadows South Boro Edgewater Garveymeade Gregory Park Greater Portmore Hellshire Independence City Morris Meadows Mount Royal Estate Marine Park Naggo Head Passage Fort Portsmouth West Mead West Cumberland Waterford Portsmouth Passage Fort Portmore Country Club Caribbean Estate External links[link] Aerial view. Photos: [1] Portmore Municipality homepage. All about the Municipality of Portmore. Portmore's Virtual Communications Hub (www.portmore.com). References[link] ^ a b c Methodology Study[dead link], Eris D. Schoburgh, Local Government Reform - National Advisory Council, Department of Local Government. ^ a b c d e A short history of Portmore, page 2. v t e Settlements in Jamaica For the definition of city, town, etc see Settlements in Jamaica. Cities Kingston Montego Bay Portmore Spanish Town Towns Above Rocks Albert Town Alexandria Alligator Pond Anchovy Annotto Bay Balaclava Bamboo Bath Bethel Town Black River Bluefields Bog Walk Brown's Town Buff Bay Bull Savanna Cambridge Cascade Cave Valley Chapelton Christiana Claremont Clarendon Park Clark's Town Coleyville Constant Spring Croft's Hill Dalvey Darliston Discovery Bay (Dry Harbour) Duncans Easington Ewarton Falmouth Frankfield Franklin Town Frome Gayle Golden Grove Gordon Town Grange Hill Green Island Guy's Hill Hagley Gap Hayes Hartland Highgate Hope Bay Hopewell, Hanover Islington Kellits Lacovia Linstead Lionel Town Little London Lluidas Vale Lucea Lucky Hill Maggotty Malvern Manchioneal Mandeville Maroon Town Mavis Bank May Pen Moneague Moore Town Morant Bay Nain Negril Newcastle Ocho Rios Old Harbour Bay Old Harbour Oracabessa Osbourne Store Petersfield Point Hill Port Antonio Port Esquivel Port Maria Port Royal Porus Race Course Richmond Rio Bueno Riversdale Rocky Point Runaway Bay Saint Ann's Bay Sandy Bay Santa Cruz Savanna-la-Mar Seaford Town Seaforth Sherwood Content Siloah Southfield Stonehenge Trinity Ville Ulster Spring Vineyard Town Wakefield Whitehouse Williamsfield Woodpark Yallahs Villages Accompong Aeolus Valley Airy Castle Barking Lodge Bog Big Woods Boscobel Bull Bay Carmel Cattawood Springs Cotterwood Duckenfield Duncans Haddersfield Hodges Hopewell Hall Hopewell, Clarendon Hopewell, Manchester Hopewell, Saint Andrew Hopewell, Saint Ann Hopewell, Saint Elizabeth Hopewell, Westmoreland Hopeton Long Wood Mavis Banks Nanny Town New Holland New Roads Nine Mile Old Pera Paynes Town Port Morant Roxborough, Manchester San San White Hall Wood Hall Neighbourhoods Kingston and St Andrew Allman Town Barbican Beverly Hills Bournemouth Gardens Camperdown Cassava Piece Cherry Gardens Cockburn Gardens Constant Spring Cooreville Gardens Cross Roads Delacree Park Denham Town Duhaney Park Eastwood Park Fletcher's Land Four Mile Grants Pen Greenwich Town Half Way Tree Hannah Town Harbour View Havendale Hope Pastures Hughenden Jack's Hill Jones Town Kencot Kingston Gardens Kintyre Liguanea Manley Meadows Mannings Hill Maxfield Meadowbrook Meadowbrook Estate Molynes Gardens Mona Mona Heights Mountain View Gardens Nannyville Gardens New Haven New Kingston Newport West Norbrook Norman Gardens Olympic Gardens Papine Patrick Gardens Pembroke Hall Perkins Estate Queensborough Queensbury Rae Town Red Hills Richmond Park Rockfort/Rennock lodge Rollington Town Seaview Gardens Shooters Hill Six Miles St Mary Stony Hill Three Mile Tivoli Gardens Trench Town Vineyard Town Washington Gardens Whitfield Town Woodford Park Ziadie Gardens

Loreena McKennitt
Background information
Birth name	Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt
Born	(1957-02-17) 17 February 1957 (age 55) Morden, Manitoba, Canada
Origin	Stratford, Ontario, Canada
Genres	Celtic, world, New Age
Occupations	Musician, songwriter, producer
Instruments	Voice, piano, harp, accordion
Years active	1985–present
Labels	Quinlan Road, Warner Bros., Verve Forecast/Universal
Website	quinlanroad.com

Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt, CM, OM (born February 17, 1957) is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist and pianist who writes, records and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. McKennitt is known for her refined, clear soprano vocals.^[1] She has sold more than 14 million records worldwide.^[2]

Early life[link]

McKennitt was born in Morden, Manitoba of Irish and Scottish descent to parents Jack (died 1992; a livestock dealer) and Irene McKennitt (1931-2011; a nurse). She moved to Stratford, Ontario in 1981, where she still resides.

When Loreena was young she wanted to become a veterinarian but she found that music chose her rather than she it.^[3] Developing a passion for Celtic music, she learned to play the Celtic harp and began busking at various places, including St. Lawrence Market in Toronto in order to earn money to record her first album.^[4]

Career[link]

McKennitt's first album, Elemental, was released in 1985, followed by To Drive the Cold Winter Away (1987), Parallel Dreams (1989), The Visit (1991), The Mask and Mirror (1994), A Winter Garden (1995), The Book of Secrets (1997), An Ancient Muse (2006), A Midwinter Night’s Dream (2008), and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2010). All of her work is released under her own label, Quinlan Road.

In 1990, McKennitt provided the music for the National Film Board of Canada documentary The Burning Times, a feminist revisionist account of the Early Modern European witchcraft trials. The main theme would later be rerecorded by her and her band and called "Tango to Evora", a track that appears on her album The Visit.

In 1993, she toured Europe supporting Mike Oldfield. In 1995, her version of the traditional Irish song "Bonny Portmore" was featured in the Highlander series. McKennitt's single "The Mummers' Dance" received airplay in North American markets during the spring of 1997, and was used as the theme song for the short-lived TV series Legacy. It also saw use in the trailer for a wide-release 1998 Drew Barrymore film Ever After.^[5]

Her music appeared in the movies The Santa Clause, Soldier, Jade, Holy Man, The Mists of Avalon and Tinkerbell; and in the television series Roar, Due South, and Full Circle (Women and Spirituality).

Personal life[link]

In 1998, McKennitt's fiancé Ronald Rees, his brother Richard and their close friend Gregory Cook drowned during a boating accident on Georgian Bay. She was deeply affected by the event and subsequently founded the Cook-Rees Memorial Fund for Water Search and Safety in the same year.

At the time of the incident, she was working on a live album of two performances called Live in Paris and Toronto. The proceeds from this album were donated to the newly created memorial fund, totaling some three million dollars.^[6] After the release of the live album, McKennitt decided to substantially reduce the number of her public performances and did not release any new recordings until the studio album An Ancient Muse in 2006.

Honours[link]

• Juno Award, Best Roots/Traditional Album 1992, for The Visit.
• Juno Award, Best Roots/Traditional Album 1994, for The Mask and Mirror.
• Billboard Music Award for International Achievement, 1997.
• Headline performer for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at The Golden Jubilee Celebrations, Province of Manitoba, 2002.
• Honorary Doctor of Letters, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2002.
• Member of the Order of Manitoba, July 2003.
• Member of the Order of Canada, July 2004.
• Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Manitoba, June 2005
• Canadian Ambassador, Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennary, June 2005
• Honorary Doctor of Laws, Queen's University, October 2005
• Investiture as Honorary Colonel, 435 Transport and Rescue Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, December 2006
• Nominated for a Grammy award, Best Contemporary World Music Album, in 2007
• Western Canadian Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, September 2009
• Performed at Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, Opening Ceremonies, February 12, 2010
• Honorary Bachelor of Applied Business, George Brown College, June 2010

Genre and work[link]

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McKennitt's music has generally been classified as World / Celtic music even though it contains aspects and characteristics of music from around the globe and is sometimes classified as Folk music in record stores.^{[citation needed]}

Before McKennitt composes any music, she engages in considerable research on a specific subject which then forms the general concept of the album.^{[citation needed]} Before creating Elemental and Parallel Dreams, she traveled to Ireland for inspiration from the country's history, folklore, geography and culture. The album The Mask and Mirror was preceded by research in Spain where she engaged in studying Galicia, a Celtic section of Spain, along with its abundant Arabic roots.^{[citation needed]} The result was an album that included elements of Celtic and Arabic music. According to the jacket notes, her album An Ancient Muse was inspired by travels among and reading about the various cultures along the Silk Road.

McKennitt is compared to Enya,^{[citation needed]} but McKennitt's music is more grounded in traditional and classical invocations,^{[citation needed]} using literary works as sources of lyrics and springboards for interpretation such as "The Lady of Shalott" by Lord Tennyson, "Prospero's Speech" (the final soliloquy in William Shakespeare's The Tempest), "Snow" by Archibald Lampman, "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, Dante's Inferno, William Blake's "Lullaby", Yeats' "The Stolen Child", "The English Ladye and the Knight" by Sir Walter Scott and "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes.

Court case[link]

In 2005, McKennitt was involved in an acrimonious court case in Britain when her former friend and employee, Niema Ash, published a book that contained intimate details of their friendship. McKennitt argued that much of the book contained confidential personal information that Ash had no right to publish. The British courts found that there had indeed been a breach of confidence and a misuse of McKennitt's private information, and the case is likely to set important precedents in British law on the privacy of celebrities.^[7] The House of Lords affirmed the lower court's decisions in 2007.

2006 and later[link]

In September 2006, McKennitt performed live at the Alhambra. The performance premiered on PBS and in August 2007 was released on a three-disc DVD/CD set titled Nights from the Alhambra.

In 2008, McKennitt wrote and composed a song she titled "To The Fairies They Draw Near" as the theme song for Disney's direct-to-video animated film Tinker Bell. She also provided the narration for the film.^[8]

In early 2008, she returned to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios to record A Midwinter Night’s Dream, an extended version of her 1995 mini-album A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season. The album was released on October 28, 2008.^[9]

Since the release of An Ancient Muse, Loreena has toured consistently, with a European and North American tour in the spring of 2007, an extensive cross Canada and United States tour in the fall of 2007, a summer tour of Europe in 2008 and a Mediterranean tour in the summer of 2009 with stops in Greece,^[10] Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Hungary and Italy.

On September 17, 2009, McKennitt announced that she planned to release a two-disc album titled "A Mediterranean Odyssey" in the fall of 2009. The first CD, "From Istanbul to Athens," consisted of ten new live recordings made during McKennitt’s 2009 Mediterranean Tour, including songs she had never before recorded in concert. The second CD, "The Olive and the Cedar," had a Mediterranean theme which McKennitt herself curated. It contained previously released studio recordings created between the years of 1994 and 2006.

November 16, 2010 saw the US release (November 12 for Europe) of McKennitt's latest studio album, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Recorded at the Sharon Temple, Ontario, it consists of nine traditional Celtic songs. "Every once and again there is a pull to return to one's own roots or beginnings, with the perspective of time and experience, to feel the familiar things you once loved and love still," says Loreena.

Documentaries[link]

Late in the 1990s, McKennitt created No Journey's End, a half-hour documentary, for American television. In it, she discussed the influences behind her music. No Journey's End contained excerpts from several songs from the albums Parallel Dreams, The Visit, and The Mask and Mirror. It also shows live performances of the songs "The Lady of Shalott," "Santiago," and "The Dark Night of the Soul." It was later released on DVD and VHS, the former also containing music videos for "The Mummers' Dance" and "The Bonny Swans." A bonus copy of the DVD was included with the 2004 remastered versions of McKennitt's CDs.

In 2008, Loreena released A Moveable Musical Feast, based on her 2007 An Ancient Muse tour. The DVD included interviews with Loreena, her band, crew, fans and professional colleagues from the Canadian music industry.

Discography[link]

Studio albums[link]

Live albums[link]

Compilations[link]

EPs[link]

Boxed sets[link]

• The Journey Begins (2008)

Singles[link]

Videos[link]

• H.M.S. Pinafore Live performance recorded during the 1981 Stratford Festival in Stratford Ontario, Canada, starring Michael Burgess, Katherine Terrell, Eric Donkin, Kenneth Pearl, Jim White, et al.; Loreena McKennitt performed in the chorus. (CBC VHS 1986)
• The Mummers' Dance (1997)
• The Bonny Swans
• Nights from the Alhambra (2007, Live concert in Spain premiered on PBS)^[22]
• A Moveable Musical Feast (2008, A tour documentary from Loreena's 2007 North American Tour)^[22]

Other[link]

• No Journey’s End (half-hour profile, aired on PBS; DVD)
• Heaven on Earth (TV Movie 1987 - played "Lady Traveler")
• Highlander III (Soundtrack contribution)
• The Santa Clause (Soundtrack contribution, "The Bells of Christmas")
• Léolo (Soundtrack contribution)
• Una casa con vista al mar (Soundtrack contribution)
• The Mists Of Avalon (Soundtrack use)
• The Burning Times (Soundtrack contribution)
• Due South (Soundtrack use)
• Northern Exposure (Soundtrack use)
• Tinker Bell (Direct to DVD movie, 2008 - Narrator)
• Soldier (Soundtrack use)

References[link]