The Island the Trade Winds Made

The Spanish arrived in Aruba in 1499 and dismissed it — along with Bonaire and Curaçao — as one of three islas inútiles, useless islands, because they found no gold. They were wrong about the gold, but the label stuck long enough to spare Aruba from the slave plantation economy that consumed most of the Caribbean. The island remained a backwater until the 1920s, when Venezuela's oil boom turned Aruba into one of the world's largest refinery sites almost overnight. That industrial chapter — the Eagle refinery, the Lago Colony, the waves of Venezuelan, Colombian and Dutch workers — is what shaped modern Aruba's peculiarly cosmopolitan character, where Papiamento blends Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English into a single compact island vernacular.

The divi-divi tree — Aruba's national symbol — grows only one way. No matter where on the island you encounter one, the trunk bends and the branches stream toward the southwest at a permanent angle of roughly 45 degrees. The culprit is the trade wind, which blows off the Atlantic at 25 miles per hour almost every day of the year without interruption. The same relentless breeze is why Aruba has almost no mosquitoes: the island is simply too windy for them to land. That perpetual air movement, combined with minimal rainfall and a flat, sun-washed terrain, places Aruba almost entirely outside the hurricane belt — a fact the divi-divi trees have been demonstrating, silently and emphatically, for centuries.