San Nicolas

According to local tradition, San Nicolas takes its name from Nicolaas van der Biest, a 19th-century landowner whom his workers addressed as "Shon Nicolaas" — "Master Nicolaas" — a name later reshaped under Spanish influence. In the late 19th century a phosphate company mined guano at Seroe Colorado and built a pier in the harbour and a six-kilometre narrow-gauge railway to the town.

Everything changed in 1924, when the Lago Oil and Transport Company opened an oil transshipment facility here, expanded in 1928 with a refinery for Venezuelan crude that grew into one of the largest in the world. Afro-Caribbean workers, many from the British islands, settled in the town in the 1920s, followed by migrants from across Latin America and the Caribbean; staff came from more than fifty countries, and many American employees lived in the Lago Colony at Seroe Colorado, with its own club and school. During the Second World War German forces attacked the refinery without success, though they sank several tankers, and guns were mounted at Colorado Point to defend it.

The refinery closed in 1985, the year a red anchor monument was set up at Seroe Colorado. It reopened in 1991 and has closed and restarted repeatedly since; in 2020 the property passed to the Government of Aruba, and plans for a new facility on the site had not gone forward by 2021. With the workers gone, San Nicolas became a sleepy town until 2016, when monuments in the centre were restored and the first Aruba Art Fair brought artists to paint its walls.

San Nicolas is the most Caribbean-English part of Aruba. Families who came from the English-speaking islands for refinery jobs gave the town its own culture, and some residents still speak San Nicolaas English, a little-studied English Creole also known as Sani English or Village Talk. The water tower of 1939 is in Art Deco style.

The town has a special place in carnival. At the end of the Second World War, refinery workers from the English-speaking Caribbean held a large parade in San Nicolas to celebrate the Allied victory, one of the roots of the island-wide carnival that began in the mid-1950s. Carnival comes each year in February or early March, and tumba has been the official style of the carnival road march since 1971.

Since the first Aruba Art Fair in September 2016, which launched the island's street art scene, the town has become an open-air gallery of more than fifty murals by local and international artists, and the art fair has continued as a festival of art and culture. Three small museums — the Community Museum, the Museum of Industry and the Model Trains Museum — tell the story of the town. San Nicolas is also proud of its sportsmen and performers: its team won the Senior League World Series in 2010, and the baseball player Xander Bogaerts and the singer Bobby Farrell were born here.

San Nicolas had 15,283 residents at the 2010 census, making it Aruba's second-largest town; many trace their roots to the British and wider Caribbean. After the refinery closed many workers moved away, and the restoration of the centre and the murals have since brought visitors back. Seroe Colorado, once the refinery's busy staff village, is now largely quiet, with many large houses standing empty. The refinery's English-language school there, opened in 1929, lives on as the International School of Aruba, founded by parents after the refinery closed in 1985.

The town is known locally as the island's "Sunrise City" on the "Sunrise Side". A 7.5-megawatt solar park, Sunrise Solar Park, is installed here, and the PaloMarga International Raceway nearby hosts drag races. Offshore, the San Nicolas Bay Reef Islands are an Important Bird Area where terns nest.

Life here is quieter and more local than in the north-west, and the town has its own harbour and central bus stop, with several bus lines running to Oranjestad.

San Nicolas eats like the rest of Aruba, with an added Caribbean-English accent from the families who came for the refinery. Island staples include keshi yena, a hollowed Edam or Gouda cheese stuffed with spiced meat, often chicken, with olives and raisins, and baked; stoba, a slow stew of goat, beef or chicken; funchi, a cornmeal dish like polenta; and pan bati, a slightly sweet griddle bread.

Fish is central — red snapper, wahoo and mahi-mahi, often served criollo style — along with conch, called kalko. Pastechi, fried pastry turnovers, are the everyday snack, sold with other local snacks along the main street's promenade. Dutch bar snacks such as bitterballen and kroket are found here too, and the Venezuelan arepa has become common street food across the island. At Baby Beach a small snack stand serves swimmers.

Balashi, the beer brewed on Aruba since 1999, is the local drink, and at Christmas families make ponche crema. The tap water, desalinated from the sea, is safe and good to drink.