Tag Archives: Willemstad

Wandering Around

January 13, 2018 Maurice Leave a comment

We spent an afternoon wandering around downtown Willemstad here on Curacao the other day. Thought I’d post a few pics of the area. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Established in 1634, it’s been cited for its “organic growth of a multicultural community.” It’s got absolutely fascinating architecture, with Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese influences. Many buildings are hundreds of years old. The building pictured in the header of this article houses the Penha store. Wonderfully detailed, it’s a delightfully bright corner at the entrance to the main shopping area.

The cannons pictured in the photos to the left and in the above paragraph, were recovered in 1995 from the Handelskade area of Curacao. The are late 18th century examples of the war machinery needed to protect Curacao. They take aim at the Queen Emma Pontoon bridge, a pedestrian only bridge, that can be moved out of the way so even the grandest of cruise ships can enter the inner harbor.

The town has a very vibrant art community. I’ve showcased some of the artwork that adorns the walls of some of the buildings in the downtown area in previous posts, and this one to the right here is fairly new. I don’t think it was on the wall the last time we came through this particular alley in early December. Just to left of this picture is the studio for one of Curacao’s most famous artists, Nena Sanchez who recently passed away. This particular alley has a lot of other galleries as well.

Curacao, Vacations

Busy Monday

May 26, 2009 Maurice 1 Comment

We had a busy day Monday. We started by snorkeling in Caracas Bay (Caracasbaii). It’s a beautiful big bay on the South coast, with very clear water for swimming. The picture we took was taken from a hill, near a souvenir shop, that is the best signed attraction on the island! haha

Once we got to the beach, we were looking for a submerged tugboat. It’s in about 20 meters of water, and it’s easily visible once you get there. It’s only about 50 meters off shore, so it’s a simple little swim, by some HUGE steel towers. We were rewarded with some very cool fish to see.

One of the coolest was this three foot long spotted moray eel. It’s not often you see morays out in the open, since they are usually nocturnal creatures, and the spotted moray is usually in sea grasses. We followed him around for quite a while, and he posed nicely for us! Apparently this is the most dangerous of all the morays… who knew? He seemed friendly enough!

After a couple hours in the ocean, we headed downtown to do a bit of shopping and site seeing. I didn’t buy any jewelry (but the week is young!), but we did see some fun handicrafts and checked out the floating market.
The bridge in the picture yesterday is a movable bridge, and here’s a picture of the bridge in motion. The ferry is a people ferry, running from the Punda (literally – the Point – the main business part of Willemstad) to the Ortobanda (literally – the other side – meaning the other side of the bay). This part of Willemstad is on the UNESCO World Heritage protected sites list.

After lunch, we headed back to the Seaquarium, and took an afternoon dip in the ocean. We cruised around the bridges and saw lots of barracuda, including a school of about 30 tiny barracuda, no more than 10 inches long.

Here is the better picture of the spotted drum I promised! He was still in the same spot we saw him yesterday. Guess it’s his house.

BTW, there is a link at the top of the page to “GALLERIES”… this has all the photos available on the website, divided into Albums, so you can see every picture we upload. Some of the pics uploaded don’t make it into the text of a message, but they are online. You can view them as a slideshow (full screen even!) or as thumbnails.

Curacao, Vacations

Sunday – relaxing

May 24, 2009 Maurice 1 Comment

Pam needs a nap! lol So I thought I’d post a bit and show you what we’ve been up to. We started the day snorkeling, just around the condo today. We saw some nice fish, but the ocean is quite different here – on one side of the resort, there is a HUGE dropoff and the ocean quickly drops away to darkness. We’ve seen a number of barracuda already.

Pam got to see her first “spotted drum” as well. It’s not the greatest shot of it, but it’s a very pretty fish, with his long flowing dorsal fin, that almost waves like a scarf. I’m sure we’ll get a better picture of one of them.

We did not see any turtles or moray eels yet, but we’re told this area has a lot of them. There are certainly a lot of barracuda around, way more than we saw on Aruba. This area is very well populated, and I was surprised to see so many barracuda hanging around, literally amongst our feet as we entered at the condo’s main beach.

Willemstad is much bigger than Orangestad on Aruba. It’s a large city, really, not simply a town. It has some typical Caribbean architecture and the bright colors we saw on Aruba.

Like Orangestad, not much is open past 2 pm on Sunday. Should be fun to see how many people are around these sites we saw today, which were virtually deserted. No cruise ships in the harbor, either today.

Nice first day – we’re off to have a nice dinner – I think we’re going for fresh seafood on the beach. Who knows? We certainly don’t! We’re on vacation! We don’t have no steenking plans!

OH BTW – there is a web cam here that Peter reminded me about – The picture it shows ALMOST shows our actual unit! You can see a balcony, on the right of the picture, and we’re the NEXT unit to the right.

Click here for the webcam.