Curaçao

Curaçao is the largest of the Dutch ABC islands and the one that most rewards a traveller who wants a real place rather than a resort. Its capital, Willemstad, is a UNESCO World Heritage city that looks like Amsterdam filtered through Caribbean sunlight; its leeward coast holds thirty-five beaches and sixty-five dive sites, most of which you can simply walk into from the sand; and its 156,000 people speak a creole language, Papiamentu, that exists nowhere else on Earth in quite this form.

Three things set the island apart from its neighbours. It is arid — cactus, divi-divi trees bent permanently by the trade wind, and an interior that looks more like Baja California than a rainforest island. It sits below the hurricane belt, and has never taken a direct hurricane strike in recorded history, which makes it one of the few genuinely year-round Caribbean destinations. And as a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands it runs on European infrastructure — good roads, clean water, working hospitals — while remaining unmistakably its own place.

What it is not is a mass-tourism island. There are cruise calls and a resort strip, but the visitor numbers are a fraction of Aruba's and the island has not been rebuilt around them. You will spend as much time in neighbourhood snèks and plantation-house restaurants as in anything built for you.

This guide covers the whole island: Willemstad's two halves and its four-century history, the beaches and the shore diving that are the main reason most people come, the wild west end at Christoffel and Shete Boka, the flamingos and salt pans of the east, keshi yena and Blue Curaçao, and everything practical from the new currency to the 127-volt sockets.

The name's origin is genuinely uncertain. The most durable theory traces it to the indigenous Caquetío, an Arawak people who lived here for over two thousand years, and to a name the Spanish rendered as Curaçao. A competing story derives it from the Portuguese coração, "heart", and a third — the one the tourist board likes — from sailors cured of scurvy on the island's citrus, making it the "island of healing". Take your pick; all three are told locally with conviction.

In Papiamentu the island is Kòrsou and its people are Yu di Kòrsou — "children of Curaçao". The affectionate national shorthand is Dushi Kòrsou: dushi means sweet, lovely, delicious, and is applied with equal sincerity to a person, a plate of food and the island itself. You will hear it within an hour of landing.

Constitutionally, Curaçao has been a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 10 October 2010, when the Netherlands Antilles were dissolved. It governs itself in almost everything; the Kingdom handles defence, foreign policy and nationality. Curaçaoans hold Dutch passports and are EU citizens, but the island itself sits outside the European Union as an Overseas Country and Territory — a distinction that matters for visas, customs and mobile roaming.

The flag, adopted in 1984, is blue for sea and sky with a yellow band for the sun and two white stars for Curaçao and its uninhabited satellite, Klein Curaçao. The five points on each star are said to stand for the five continents its people came from — which, for an island built by Arawak, Iberian, Dutch, African, Sephardic-Jewish and Latin American arrivals, is close to literally true.

Curaçao lies in the southern Caribbean, only 65 km off the Venezuelan coast and well outside the hurricane belt. At 444 km² it is the largest of the ABC islands — Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao — measuring 61 km long and between 5 and 14 km wide. For scale, it is about half the size of Prague's administrative area, and you can drive its full length in ninety minutes.

The geology is the reason for the diving. The island is uplifted coral limestone with almost no rivers and therefore almost no sediment run-off: underwater visibility routinely exceeds 30 metres, and the reef begins a few metres from shore before dropping away as a wall.

Curaçao runs north-west to south-east, with Willemstad roughly two-thirds of the way down the south coast. The island divides neatly into Banda Abou (the west — beaches, parks, plantation houses) and Banda Ariba (the east — Jan Thiel, Spanish Water, salt pans and the airport).

Distances are small and the roads are good: Willemstad to Westpunt at the far west is about 45 minutes, to Jan Thiel 15, to the airport 20. There is effectively no useful public transport for visitors outside the city, which is why a rental car is the default recommendation for anyone staying more than two days.

The Caquetío, an Arawak people from the South American mainland, lived on Curaçao for more than two thousand years before Europeans arrived. Their petroglyphs survive in the Hato Caves and at several inland sites. Alonso de Ojeda claimed the island for Spain in 1499; finding no gold and little fresh water, the Spanish declared it an isla inútil, a useless island, used it for cattle, and deported most of the indigenous population to Hispaniola.

The Dutch West India Company took the island in 1634 — not for farming but for the harbour and the salt. Within a generation Willemstad became one of the most important trading posts in the Caribbean, and, from the 1660s, the region's largest slave-trading depot. Enslaved Africans were landed, held and sold on from Curaçao across Spanish America. This is the central fact of the island's history and Curaçao does not soften it: the Kura Hulanda Museum in Otrobanda, built around a former slave yard, is one of the most serious museums of the Atlantic slave trade anywhere.

A major slave revolt in 1795, led by Tula and Bazjan Karpata and inspired by the Haitian revolution, was crushed after a month; Tula was executed with deliberate brutality. He is now a national hero, 17 August is Tula Day, and the Netherlands formally apologised for its role in slavery in 2022. Abolition itself came only in 1863.

The 20th century was rewritten by oil. Venezuela's Maracaibo fields could not be refined on site, so Shell built a refinery on the Schottegat in 1918, drawing workers from across the Caribbean, Madeira and Asia and turning a quiet trading island into an industrial economy. The refinery dominated Curaçao for a century — economically, environmentally and politically — before winding down; what to do with the site is still a live argument.

Politically: universal suffrage in 1949, autonomy within the Kingdom in 1954, the 30 May 1969 labour uprising that burned part of Willemstad and forced real political change for Afro-Curaçaoans, and finally the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on 10 October 2010, when Curaçao became a country in its own right.

Any honest guide to Curaçao has to say what the harbour was for. Between roughly 1660 and 1795 the Dutch West India Company shipped an estimated hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans through Willemstad, holding them in yards near the water before selling them onward to the Spanish colonies. The pastel merchant houses on Handelskade were paid for, directly or indirectly, by that trade.

One practical note: give Kura Hulanda a proper two hours and go before the beaches, not after. It changes how the rest of the island reads — including the cheerful floating market, which is a modern descendant of the same Caribbean-Venezuelan trading network.

Curaçao's 156,000 people are among the most genuinely multicultural populations in the Americas: African, Dutch, Sephardic Jewish, Portuguese and Madeiran, Venezuelan and Colombian, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian and Surinamese, layered over an Arawak substrate. More than fifty nationalities live on an island you can drive across in ninety minutes, and the resulting culture is Caribbean, European and South American at once without being derivative of any of them.

One social note worth carrying: Curaçao's colour and class history is not settled, and the gap between the wealthy, largely white and expatriate districts and the neighbourhoods of Otrobanda and Bandabou is visible. Curaçaoans discuss it openly among themselves. A visitor who arrives with opinions about it will be listened to politely and not agreed with; a visitor who asks questions will get a much better conversation.

Papiamentu is a creole built from Portuguese and Spanish, with Dutch, English, Arawak and West African words folded in, and it is spoken as a mother tongue by almost everyone on the island. It is not a dialect or a pidgin: it has standardised orthography, newspapers, literature, its own school instruction and official status alongside Dutch and English. Hearing it is one of the genuine pleasures of the island — it sounds like Portuguese being spoken by someone in a very good mood.

Most Curaçaoans move fluently between four languages — Papiamentu, Dutch, English and Spanish — often within a single sentence. You will have no communication difficulty whatsoever in English. Learning six words of Papiamentu is therefore entirely optional, and entirely worth it, because nobody expects it and everybody notices.

Note the spelling: Papiamentu with a u is the Curaçao and Bonaire standard; Papiamento with an o is the Aruban one. The difference is small, local, and occasionally a matter of pride.

Willemstad is the capital, the reason for the island and a UNESCO World Heritage city since 1997. The historic centre straddles the narrow Sint Anna Bay, which cuts through the town to reach the deep Schottegat harbour behind it. Everything of interest is on one side of the water or the other, and crossing between them is itself an attraction.

Punda — "the Point"

The original 1634 settlement, laid out on a grid behind Fort Amsterdam, which still houses the government. Its waterfront, the Handelskade, is the row of pastel gabled merchant houses on every photograph of the Caribbean's Dutch side. Behind it are the shopping streets of Breedestraat and Heerenstraat, the Old Market (Marshe Bieu) for lunch, and the floating market, where Venezuelan traders sell fruit, vegetables and fish from boats moored along the Sha Caprileskade.

Otrobanda — "the Other Side"

Older-feeling, rougher, and far more rewarding to walk. Otrobanda grew as the free and working-class quarter and has the island's best street art, its most interesting small restaurants, and Museum Kura Hulanda. The Rif Fort at the harbour mouth has been converted into a dining and shopping complex, which is pleasant and entirely un-representative of the district behind it.

Scharloo and Pietermaai

Scharloo was the quarter of the wealthy Jewish merchant families; its ornate mansions along the Scharlooweg range from immaculately restored to spectacularly derelict, and it sees almost no tourists. Pietermaai, just east of Punda, was similarly abandoned and has been restored into the island's restaurant and nightlife district — colonial façades, courtyards, cocktails.

The Queen Emma Bridge

The "Swinging Old Lady" is a pontoon bridge that pivots aside up to thirty times a day to let ships into the harbour. Crossing it is free; standing on it as it swings open, with the town rotating around you, is the small unforgettable thing about Willemstad. When it is open, free ferries carry pedestrians across.

Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia and later from Dutch Brazil began arriving in Curaçao from 1651, and the community they founded — Mikvé Israel-Emanuel — is the oldest Jewish congregation in continuous existence in the Americas. Its synagogue, consecrated in 1732, is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the western hemisphere still in use.

The floor is covered in sand. Explanations differ and the congregation offers all of them: a memory of the desert of the Exodus; a memory of the sand that muffled footsteps in the secret synagogues of the Inquisition; and simply what Caribbean floors were. Whichever it is, walking on it is the reason to come.

The attached Jewish Cultural Historical Museum holds ritual objects going back to the seventeenth century, and the Beth Haim cemetery at Blenheim, in use from 1659, is the oldest surviving European cemetery in the Americas — though it sits in the shadow of the old refinery and its stones have suffered badly for it.

The community's importance to the island is out of all proportion to its size. Sephardic merchant families built much of Punda and Scharloo, financed the trade the harbour lived on, and — like every merchant class in the seventeenth-century Caribbean — participated in the slave economy. Both things are part of the history, and the museum says so.

The western third of the island is where Curaçao stops being Dutch and becomes wild: cactus hills, plantation houses, the best beaches and two national parks. Give it a full day at minimum; a rental car is essentially required.

The road west (the Weg naar Westpunt) is good tarmac; the side roads down to the smaller beaches are often not. A normal hire car copes with all of them slowly, but check the insurance wording on unpaved roads before you commit to Playa Jeremi.

East of Willemstad the island flattens out into salt pans, mangrove and the big inland bay of Spanish Water. It is where most of the resorts, the airport and the island's flamingos are.

Also out east: the ostrich farm at Groot St. Joris, which is exactly as unlikely as it sounds and genuinely entertaining, and the aloe plantation next door where the island's traditional medicine crop is still processed.

Curaçao has more than thirty-five beaches, nearly all of them on the sheltered south coast and nearly all of them small coves rather than long strands. Several charge a modest entrance fee (roughly $3–10) which buys you toilets, loungers, a bar and usually a dive shop; the free ones have nothing at all, which is often the point.

Two practicalities. Many beaches have rocky or coral entries, so water shoes are genuinely useful. And reef-safe sunscreen matters here — the reef starts a few metres from the sand, and oxybenzone-based sunscreen ends up on it within minutes.

Curaçao is one of the best shore-diving destinations in the world. Sixty-five-plus named sites, most of them entered by walking off a beach, visibility routinely above 30 metres, water at 26–28 °C all year, negligible current on the leeward coast, and a fringing reef that starts shallow and then drops away as a wall. You do not need a boat, and for much of the island you do not need a guide.

The Curaçao Marine Park now protects the whole leeward coast, and the reef here has come through the last two decades of Caribbean bleaching noticeably better than most of the region. There is a modest marine-park fee for divers; pay it.

For snorkellers, the point is that you need almost nothing. Playa Porto Mari's double reef, Playa Lagun's turtles, Tugboat, and the house reefs at Jan Thiel and Director's Bay are all walk-in. Bring your own mask — rental masks fit badly and a leaking mask ruins a week.

An arid island supports a strange and specific set of animals, and Curaçao's are mostly visible without effort — the iguanas are on the walls of your hotel and the flamingos are beside the road.

The island's plant life is as distinctive as its fauna: columnar kadushi cactus (which becomes a soup), datu cactus fences that are still planted as living walls, aloe, and the wind-bent divi-divi trees that point unfailingly south-west because the trade wind never stops.

Kuminda krioyo — creole food — is Curaçao's own cooking, built from Dutch, West African, Portuguese, Indonesian and Latin American parts. It is stew-and-starch food, unfashionable, generous, and best eaten at lunchtime in a market or a snèk rather than at dinner in a restaurant.

Where to eat: Marshe Bieu (the Old Market) in Punda for a canteen lunch of stobá and funchi at long tables, Plasa Bieu's neighbouring food stalls, Pietermaai for dinner, and any roadside snèk in Otrobanda or Bandabou for the real thing. Sunday brunch of krioyo food is an institution.

The island gave its name to one of the world's most recognisable liqueurs, and the story is better than the cocktail. When the Spanish planted Valencia oranges here in the sixteenth century, the arid soil and salt air produced a mutation: a small, bitter, almost inedible fruit the islanders named laraha. The flesh is worthless. The dried peel, it turns out, is extraordinarily aromatic.

Senior & Co. at Landhuis Chobolobo have made the genuine article since 1896, in copper stills, and are the only producer entitled to call it Curaçao of Curaçao. The tour is short, cheap, self-guided and ends in a tasting room; go for the smell of the drying peel alone. The crucial detail: the original liqueur is clear. The blue was added purely for marketing in the 1930s, and the orange, green and red versions are the same spirit with different dye. The clear Triple Sec is what to bring home.

Curaçao's evenings run on three registers, and most visitors sample all of them in a week.

Curaçao has a semi-arid tropical climate: warm, dry and windy, with almost no seasonal variation. Daytime temperatures sit at 28–32 °C all year, nights at 24–26 °C, and the sea at 26–28 °C. The constant easterly trade wind is what makes it bearable at midday and what makes the north coast unswimmable.

For divers there is effectively no bad season, though the December to February north swell stirs the water and shuts down the exposed sites — which is exactly when Boka Pistol in Shete Boka is at its most spectacular. You cannot have both on the same day.

Curaçao International Airport (CUR), still universally called Hato, sits fifteen minutes north of Willemstad. It is modern, small and easy.

Parking in Punda is difficult; use the Otrobanda car parks and cross the Queen Emma Bridge on foot, which is quicker and considerably more enjoyable. Fuel is sold in litres and priced in guilders, and the stations are self-service with card payment.

There is no direct flight from Prague, Vienna or Bratislava. Every route runs through Amsterdam, and that single fact makes the trip unusually simple to plan.

Entry: Curaçao is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands but not part of the EU or the Schengen area — a Schengen visa does not apply here and EU freedom of movement does not either. In practice, EU citizens including Czech and Slovak nationals need no visa for tourist stays of up to 90 days, but everyone must complete an online immigration card before arrival and hold a return ticket, proof of accommodation and valid travel insurance. Requirements change; check the official portal and your own ministry before you fly.

Practical notes for European travellers: the sockets are American (type A/B) at 127 volts, which is unlike anywhere in Europe — phone and laptop chargers handle it, hairdryers and travel kettles do not. Your EU mobile plan's roaming rules do not apply, because the island is outside the EU; buy a local prepaid SIM instead. And Curaçao is not covered by the European Health Insurance Card, so proper travel insurance with medical cover is not optional.

Two things to arrange before arrival: the online immigration/embarkation card, which every visitor must submit, and travel insurance with medical and, for divers, decompression cover — DAN membership if you are diving seriously. Neither takes long and both are checked.

Tipping: many restaurants add a service charge of 10–15%; check the bill before adding more. Otherwise round up, and tip dive guides and boat crews as you would anywhere.

Curaçao is mid-priced for the Caribbean — clearly cheaper than Aruba or St Barths, roughly level with Bonaire, and much cheaper than either if you self-cater and use the free beaches. Prices below are in US dollars, which is what everything is effectively quoted in.

Realistic daily budgets: $80–120 per person self-catering with a shared hire car and free beaches, $150–250 mid-range with restaurants and diving. A week of shore diving with an apartment and a car is one of the better value propositions in the Caribbean.

Where you stay on Curaçao determines what kind of holiday you have, more than on most islands, because the distances are just large enough to matter.

A tactic that works well: three or four nights in Pietermaai for the city, the museums and the food, then the rest of the week in an apartment out west for the beaches and the diving. It costs nothing extra and gives you both islands that Curaçao is.

Historic Area of Willemstad, Inner City and Harbour was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997, as an outstanding example of European colonial town planning adapted to the tropics — and as a settlement whose architecture records four centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Caribbean contact.

The inscription covers four historic districts: Punda (the fortified 1634 core), Otrobanda (the eighteenth-century town on the far bank), Scharloo (the merchant villas) and Pietermaai, along with Sint Anna Bay and the fort system. What UNESCO singles out is the adaptation: Dutch gable forms rebuilt with galleries, shutters and verandas for a climate they were never designed for.

The famous colours have a well-worn origin story: Governor Albert Kikkert, in the early 1800s, is said to have banned white façades because the glare gave him migraines — and, some versions add, because he owned the paint company. It is probably legend. The colours are nonetheless protected now, and the palette is regulated.

Walking the site takes half a day and costs nothing: Fort Amsterdam, Handelskade, the floating market, across the Queen Emma Bridge, through Otrobanda to Kura Hulanda, and back along the Scharlooweg. Restoration is uneven — immaculate on the waterfront, ruinous two streets inland — and that contrast is part of what there is to see.

Curaçao has a small, plural and generally free press. Amigoe (Dutch) and Extra and Èxtra (Papiamentu) are the main dailies, the Curaçao Chronicle serves English readers, and Antilliaans Dagblad covers the wider Dutch Caribbean. Press freedom is protected in law and in practice, and the Kingdom's standards apply.

Broadcast: TeleCuraçao is the main local channel, Dutch public channels arrive by satellite, and radio matters more than television — Dolfijn FM, Hit Radio and Easy FM, which become the nervous system of the island during the carnival tumba season.

Digitally, Facebook and WhatsApp do most of the work; Instagram does the tourism. The island's other media story is the one that appears in foreign headlines: Curaçao has long been the licensing jurisdiction for a large share of the world's online gambling operators, and the overhaul of that licensing regime through the new Curaçao Gaming Authority is one of the bigger domestic policy stories of the decade.

For visitors: local news in English is thin but the Chronicle covers what matters, and the Curaçao Meteorological Service's marine forecast is the one page divers and sailors should bookmark.

Baseball is the island's sport, and its record is genuinely extraordinary. A population of 156,000 has produced Andruw Jones, Kenley Jansen, Jurickson Profar, Ozzie Albies, Didi Gregorius, Jonathan Schoop and Roger Bernadina, and Willemstad's Pabao team won the Little League World Series in 2004 and has reached the final several times since. MLB scouts are permanently present, and every neighbourhood has a diamond.

Also worth having: a driving licence (an international permit is recommended though usually not demanded), motion-sickness tablets for the Klein Curaçao crossing, and a dry bag for the boat trips. Leave behind: euros — change them for dollars before you go or withdraw dollars on arrival.

Click any image to enlarge. Been to Curaçao? Send your photos to photos@kaufmann.wtf to be featured here with full credit.

Handelskade

The UNESCO waterfront at golden hour

Punda from the water

Dutch gables adapted to the tropics

The Swinging Old Lady

A pontoon bridge that pivots aside 30 times a day

Punda streets

Shutters, gables and a regulated colour palette

The floating market

Venezuelan boats trading fruit and fish, as they have for generations

Mikvé Israel-Emanuel

1732, and a sand floor you are meant to walk on

Pietermaai

A derelict quarter turned into the island's dinner table

Grote Knip

The most photographed beach on the island — and free

Cas Abao

Powder sand, full facilities, reef a short swim out

The leeward wall

Sixty-five sites, most of them entered from the sand

Christoffel National Park

Cactus, deer, and the island's only real climb

Shete Boka

Seven inlets where the Atlantic detonates into limestone

Klein Curaçao

Twenty-five kilometres offshore, an abandoned lighthouse and wrecks

Gran Marcha

The closing parade of a two-month carnival season

Landhuis Chobolobo

Where genuine Curaçao liqueur has been made since 1896

Blue Curaçao

Clear in the bottle originally — the blue was a 1930s marketing idea

Before travelling, check your own foreign ministry's advice — for Czech readers mzv.gov.cz, which also runs the DROZD registration system. The UNESCO listing for Willemstad is at whc.unesco.org.

On screen: search for footage of the Tugboat and Superior Producer wrecks before you dive them, and for the Gran Marcha parade if you want to understand why carnival takes two months. The Kura Hulanda museum has produced educational material on the slave trade that is worth more than any travel vlog.