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Curaçao
A constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands off the coast of Venezuela
Curaçao's capital, Willemstad, greets arriving ships with a waterfront of gabled, brightly painted merchant houses that look as if Amsterdam had been recolored under a tropical sun. The island lies in the southern Caribbean, about 65 kilometers off the coast of Venezuela, and since October 10, 2010, it has been a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, formally an equal partner with the Netherlands, Aruba, and Sint Maarten. It writes its own laws, elects its own parliament, and since March 2025 has used a new currency, the Caribbean guilder, shared with Sint Maarten. The Kingdom handles defense and foreign affairs, and Curaçaoans hold Dutch nationality and EU citizenship, though the island itself lies outside the European Union.
The island is about 60 kilometers long and covers 444 square kilometers of dry, cactus-studded limestone terraces and volcanic hills, rising to Christoffelberg at 372 meters in the northwest. It lies south of the main hurricane belt, and steady trade winds shape a semi-arid climate. The deep natural harbor of the Schottegat, reached through the narrow Sint Annabaai channel, made it a shipping and refining hub. The Central Bureau of Statistics counted 158,006 residents at the start of 2026. Papiamentu, a Creole language with Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and African roots, is the language of daily life and is official alongside Dutch and English. The economy rests on tourism, financial services, and the port, while the large Isla oil refinery, long operated by Venezuela's state oil company, has stood largely idle since 2019.
The Dutch West India Company took the island from Spain in 1634 and made it a center of the Caribbean slave trade, a history recalled each year in commemorations of the 1795 uprising led by Tula, now honored as a national hero. Sephardic Jews who arrived from the 1650s built the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel synagogue, the oldest in continuous use in the Americas, and the historic area of Willemstad was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. Curaçao was the seat of the Netherlands Antilles until that federation dissolved in 2010, after islanders voted in a 2005 referendum for separate status within the Kingdom. Relations with The Hague remain a recurring debate over budgets, financial oversight, and autonomy, and the island's position off the Venezuelan coast gives it strategic weight in the region.