The Falmouth Courthouse, built in 1815 on the north side of Water Square, is one of the finest examples of Georgian public architecture in Jamaica. The building is a handsome two-storey structure with a colonnaded veranda on the upper level, symmetrical windows, and proportions typical of the British colonial administrative style of the period. It has been restored and is still in use as a courthouse, which gives it a vitality that many preserved colonial buildings lack.
The courthouse faces Water Square, the town's central public space, where the old water system once fed the town. The square is shaded and quiet on non-cruise days, a good place to sit and take in the scale and ambition of what was built here in a few frantic decades of sugar money. The surrounding buildings, though in varying states of repair, give a strong sense of what an early nineteenth-century Caribbean town looked like.