The Colours of Curaçao

There's a bridge in Willemstad that floats on sixteen pontoon boats and swings open sideways for ships. It's called the Queen Emma, locals call it the Swinging Old Lady, and it's been swinging since 1888. That's Curaçao in one image: improbable, colourful, and cheerfully doing its own thing in the middle of the sea.

Where it all began

The Arawak people lived here first; the Dutch West India Company arrived in 1634 and made Willemstad one of the busiest ports of the Caribbean. The waterfront they built, Handelskade, a row of Dutch gabled houses painted mango, teal and rose, is UNESCO World Heritage and possibly the most photographed street in the Caribbean. Legend says an early governor claimed white buildings gave him headaches, so the whole town went technicolor. The island also holds one of the hemisphere's oldest continuously used synagogues, Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, from 1732, with a floor of white sand. Since 2010, Curaçao is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Caribbean soul, Dutch passport.

The minds

Curaçao's genius is linguistic. Nearly everyone speaks four languages, Papiamentu, Dutch, English, Spanish, switching mid-sentence like it's nothing. Papiamentu itself is the island's masterpiece: a Creole of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and African languages, spoken nowhere else on Earth but here and its sister islands, with its own literature and newspapers. The island gave baseball a production line of major leaguers, Andruw Jones, Andrelton Simmons, Kenley Jansen, one of the highest big-league rates per capita anywhere. And the tumba and ritmo kombiná of carnival season are studied by musicologists and danced by everyone else.

Made in Curaçao

Yes, the blue liqueur is real and really from here: Blue Curaçao descends from the laraha, a bitter orange that only grows properly on this island, descendant of Valencia oranges that failed in the dry soil and mutated into something better. The Senior family has distilled it at Landhuis Chobolobo since 1896. Beyond the bottle: one of the Caribbean's great natural harbours, a centuries-old trading economy, offshore services, and a dry, cactus-dotted landscape that makes its own aloe and sea salt.

Where to go

Willemstad first: cross the swinging bridge, eat at the old market where ladies cook stoba in giant pots, and walk Pietermaai, the once-crumbling quarter now full of boutique hotels and street art. Then the west end, where the real island lives: Grote Knip and Cas Abao, beaches of white sand and water in five blues; Westpunt's cliff jumpers; Shete Boka, where the wild north coast explodes into blowholes.

Under the surface it gets better. Curaçao's reefs are among the healthiest in the Caribbean, and the Tugboat wreck sits in five metres of clear water, snorkelable by anyone. Christoffel National Park's peak gives you the whole island before nine a.m., go early, it closes to climbers by late morning for the heat. And in the inland countryside, the landhuizen, old plantation houses in ochre and white, tell the island's full story, including its hard chapters, honestly.

Culture, on a plate and in the ear

Eat keshi yená, cheese stuffed with spiced chicken, a dish invented from leftovers that became the national treasure. Stoba (stew) of goat or papaya, fresh fish at Playa Piskadó where the pelicans supervise the fishermen. Drink the famous liqueur over ice at the distillery where it was born. And time your visit for Carnival, January to March, when the Tumba Festival crowns a song and the Gran Marcha takes over the streets in feathers and sequins. Dushi is the word you'll learn first; it means sweet, lovely, delicious, and the island uses it for food, people and life itself.

Every colour is someone's home. I print it the way memory keeps it: vintage-washed, distressed, made to order.

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P.S. Blue above and below for sky and sea, a gold stripe for the sun between them, two stars for Curaçao and Klein Curaçao. An island that put its own geography on its chest. Find your flag.