CuraçaoCulture and History Tours in Curaçao

The city is two halves facing each other across Sint Anna Bay. Punda is the older commercial side, once walled, still the place for the Handelskade waterfront that every photograph of Curaçao leads with: tall Dutch merchant houses in ochre, blue and green, standing shoulder to shoulder along the water. Otrobanda, which means the other side in Papiamentu, is the residential half, looser and more lived-in, with murals covering whole walls and the best view back at the postcard.

Between them floats the Queen Emma Bridge, a pontoon walkway that swings open to let ships into the harbour, sometimes mid-crossing. When it opens, free ferries run instead. The bridge closing again with people waiting on both sides is the most reliably charming thing that happens in this city, and it happens all day.

Mikvé Israel-Emanuel in Punda is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Americas. The congregation dates to 1651 and the building was consecrated in 1732, and the floor is covered in sand, a practice usually read as a memorial to the years when Sephardic Jews had to worship in silence. The Jewish Cultural-Historical Museum attached to it holds a mikveh and Torah scrolls carried here by the first settlers.

Across the bay in Otrobanda, the Kura Hulanda Museum tells the other half of the island's story. Curaçao was a Dutch West India Company depot in the transatlantic slave trade, and the museum sits in a restored 19th-century merchant's house at the centre of a quarter rebuilt from ruin. It covers the African cultures the trade drew from, not only the trade itself. It is a serious visit and worth the time it asks.

The Spanish planted Valencia oranges here in the sixteenth century and the fruit did not take to the dry soil. What grew instead was a small, bitter, largely inedible orange the island came to call the laraha, and the peel of that failure is what makes Blue Curaçao.

Landhuis Chobolobo, an old plantation house in the Salinja district, is where the genuine article is still distilled by the original method, and the trees are on the grounds. Tours run through the distillery and end where you would hope. The blue, for the record, is added. The liqueur itself comes out clear, and the colour was a marketing decision that worked far better than the oranges ever did.

Scattered across the countryside are the landhuizen, the plantation houses that ran the island's estates. Several are open and each has taken a different direction. Savonet inside Christoffel National Park is now a museum covering the estate and the people who worked it. Kas di Pali Maishi is a reconstructed maize-stalk dwelling showing how the enslaved and later the freed actually lived, which is the necessary counterweight to the grand houses on the hills.

Out in the kunuku, the dry interior, the pace changes entirely: goats on the road, cactus fences, and villages where Papiamentu is the only language you will hear all afternoon.

Curaçaoan food is the island's history on a plate. Keshi yena is spiced meat baked inside a hollowed wheel of Edam, invented from the rinds Dutch colonists discarded. Funchi is cornmeal, stoba is a slow stew, and pastechi is the fried pastry everyone eats standing up before work. Iguana soup is on menus and is not a tourist joke.

Papiamentu is the mother tongue, a creole built from Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English and West African languages, and it is the clearest single artefact of who has passed through here. Learning two words goes a long way. Bon bini is welcome. Danki is thank you.