The Dutch Caribbean's painted city — Queen Emma pontoon bridge, Handelskade facades and hidden Jewish heritage
Willemstad is the capital of Curaçao, a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the southern Caribbean — 65km from the Venezuelan coast, an island of desert landscapes, strong trade winds, and a capital with one of the most extraordinary colonial cityscapes in the Western Hemisphere. The UNESCO-listed historic district (Punda and Otrobanda) consists of Dutch colonial warehouse buildings painted in vivid tropical colours — the famous Handelskade waterfront is Instagram-famous, but the streets behind it contain 17th-century merchant houses, the oldest active synagogue in the Am…
The Dutch West India Company seized Curaçao from Spain in 1634, recognising its deep natural harbour (Schottegat, now an oil refinery site) as the finest in the Caribbean. Willemstad became the WIC's main base in the Americas — a slave-trading hub that transported an estimated 135,000 Africans through its harbour to plantations across the Caribbean. The city's Jewish population arrived in 1651, initially expelled from Recife, Brazil when the Portuguese retook it from the Dutch; they built the Mikvé Israel synagogue in 1732 — still the oldest functioning synagogue in the Americas — and establi…