Willemstad

The Dutch West India Company took Curaçao from Spain in 1634 and built a walled town on the eastern point of the harbour mouth, which became Punda, from the Dutch "de punt". Fort Amsterdam, raised that same year, served as the company's headquarters. The deep natural harbour of the Schottegat made the town a trading hub, and it soon became one of the major centres of the Atlantic slave trade, which drove rapid growth. Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam and Recife settled as merchants, and the name Willemstad, honouring a Prince of Orange, is first recorded in 1680.

The walled town outgrew itself. Pietermaai was laid out beyond the walls in 1675, Otrobanda — "the other side" — across the bay in 1707, and Scharloo followed on a former company plantation. By 1818 Willemstad and its suburbs held about 9,500 people. The walls came down after 1861, the Queen Emma pontoon bridge joined the two sides of the bay in 1888, and a hurricane in 1877 swept away much of Pietermaai. In 1915 Royal Dutch Shell built its refinery on the harbour, and the oil boom created new neighbourhoods, including company housing at Julianadorp and Emmastad.

On 30 May 1969 a strike at a refinery subcontractor became the riots of Trinta di Mei; two people died, part of the historic centre burned and Dutch marines were sent in. Shell left in the mid-1980s and the refinery passed to the government, which leased it to Venezuela's PDVSA until refining stopped at the end of 2019. In 1997 the historic centre was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a large programme of restoration has since revived its old quarters.

Willemstad's culture is Afro-Caribbean at its core and spoken in Papiamentu, but layered with Dutch, Sephardic Jewish, Latin American and other influences that show in its churches, synagogues and streets. Otrobanda was long the cultural centre of the city, and its walls are now covered in murals from Kaya Kaya, a street-art festival held in the neighbourhood.

Music and parades mark the year. Carnival has been a festival for the whole population since 1961 and runs for about two months, beginning with the election of the Prince and Pancho and the queen, moving through the Tumba Festival, which crowns a king or queen of tumba, and peaking in the 6.5-kilometre Gran Marcha. On Easter Monday the Seú harvest festival parades through Otrobanda to its own music. Tambú, the drum-and-chant form once restricted by the church and the authorities, is part of the same inheritance.

Sport is a point of pride. Willemstad has produced a long line of Major League Baseball players, among them Andruw Jones, Kenley Jansen and Jurickson Profar, and its Little League teams have won world titles, the first in 2004. In 2025 Curaçao became the smallest nation ever to qualify for a football World Cup, and the city followed the team to its first World Cup point in 2026.

Willemstad held about 137,000 people in 2011, around nine-tenths of the island's population. Over the years the city has spread to fill the whole area around the Schottegat harbour, from the old quarters to residential districts such as Brievengat in the north, Santa Maria near the airport, and Buena Vista, built for refinery workers.

The harbour remains the economic centre: Willemstad is one of the largest oil-handling ports in the Caribbean, with ship repair and the idle refinery whose future is still being decided. Banks and international companies are drawn by the island's tax rules, the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten and the Dutch Caribbean Securities Exchange are based here, and the University of Curaçao and medical schools bring students. Tourism, with cruise ships docking beside Otrobanda and divers heading for the reefs, is a major industry.

Daily life is bilingual or trilingual and largely car-dependent once beyond the centre. Punda's shopping streets are busy on weekdays and quiet on Sundays, office workers queue for lunch at Plasa Bieu, and evenings move to the bars of Pietermaai and the beach clubs east of town. The cost of living, unemployment and the arrival of Venezuelans fleeing the crisis next door are recurring concerns.

Willemstad's kitchens serve Curaçaoan home cooking with Dutch, Latin and African threads. The signature dish is keshi yena, a hollowed round of Edam or Gouda cheese stuffed with spiced meat, often chicken, with olives and raisins, then baked or steamed. Stobá, a stew of goat, beef or papaya, is an everyday staple, as are guiambo, a slippery okra-and-seafood soup, kadushi, a soup made from cactus, and sopi mondongo, an intestine soup. Funchi, a cornmeal paste close to polenta, comes with most plates, alongside salt fish, fresh fish or goat.

Pastechi, fried pastry turnovers filled with cheese, tuna, chicken or minced meat, are the usual breakfast and snack. At lunchtime the small restaurants of Plasa Bieu in Punda serve krioyo, Chinese and Jamaican plates to locals working nearby, and the boats of the floating market on the Punda waterfront have long sold fish and fruit. The island's many "snacks", small bar-restaurants that double as convenience stores, serve cheap Chinese food late into the evening, and Indonesian dishes such as satay with peanut sauce arrived by way of Suriname.

The city's own drink is Curaçao liqueur, flavoured with the dried peel of the laraha, a bitter orange descended from the Seville oranges brought by the Spanish; the Senior family began selling it from their pharmacy in 1896 and has distilled it at Landhuis Chobolobo since 1947. Amstel Bright, a pale lager served with a wedge of lime, is a popular beer.