The Useless Island That Made the World Blue

In 1499, Spanish conquistadors arrived at Curaçao and pronounced it — along with Bonaire and Aruba — one of three islas inútiles, useless islands, because they found neither gold nor a native population large enough to enslave for plantation work. The Spanish were wrong about the gold, but they were right that Curaçao would defy easy exploitation. The island's poor soil and near-total absence of fresh water made conventional plantation agriculture nearly impossible, so the Dutch, who seized it in 1634, built something different: a trading hub. Willemstad became one of the busiest entrepôts in the Atlantic world, and the Sint Annabaai channel — the same waterway the Queen Emma Bridge still crosses — hosted ships carrying enslaved people, cotton, indigo and silver between three continents for more than two centuries. It is not a comfortable history, and the Kurá Hulanda Museum does not let you forget it.

Out of that unlikely soil grew one of the island's strangest exports: a liqueur the colour of a swimming pool. The laraha orange — a descendant of Valencia oranges brought by Spanish settlers in the 1500s — proved spectacularly unfit to eat. The soil was too arid, the fruit too bitter. But the dried peel was extraordinarily aromatic, and in 1896 a Dutch family named Senior began distilling it with neutral spirits at Landhuís Chobolobo. The resulting liqueur was originally amber. The blue came later, when someone decided that an island famous for the colour of its water deserved a drink to match. Today Blue Curaçao is in cocktails on every continent, and almost nobody who orders one knows that the island it is named for is Dutch, speaks four languages on any given street corner, and was once dismissed as utterly worthless.