Aruba Geography, Climate & Nature

Aruba lies on the continental shelf of South America in the southern Caribbean, 29 kilometres north of Venezuela's Paraguaná peninsula and 80 north-west of Curaçao, the westernmost of the ABC islands; it covers 179 square kilometres, 32 kilometres from north-west to south-east and 10 across at its widest, with 68.5 kilometres of coast. The south and west are low limestone terraces edged with the white sand beaches -- Eagle, Palm and the rest -- that the resorts stand on; the north-east is the older Aruba Lava Formation of rolling hills, Jamanota the highest among them, where the Arikok National Park covers 34 square kilometres, about a fifth of the island; and the north coast is high plateau constantly battered by the open sea, with caves and small natural bridges. The Hooiberg cone rises 165 metres near the centre.

Oranjestad, the capital, with some 28,700 people, sits on the south-west coast two and a half kilometres from Queen Beatrix airport; San Nicolas and its refinery are at the south-eastern end, Palm Beach's hotels six kilometres north-west of the capital. The island has no administrative subdivisions, only eight census regions, and no rivers: rainfall is about 500 millimetres a year in a hot semi-arid climate, and the trade wind from the north-east is constant.

Aruba sits south of the main development region for tropical cyclones and usually escapes them, though two early-stage hurricanes passed in 2020, and it is, the Canadian advisory notes, in an active seismic zone.

Aruba has a hot semi-arid climate, warm all year with little variation between day and night or month and month, moderated by the constant trade winds from the north-east. Rainfall totals only about 500 millimetres a year and the island stays dry even in its nominal rainy season, which the geography article places between September and January; the total swings with the Southern Oscillation, from as little as 150 millimetres in strong El Niño years to over 1,000 in La Niña years.

The island lies south of the main development region for tropical cyclones and generally avoids their direct impact; the advisories say the June-to-November season passes mostly to the north, that there is no record of a recent major hurricane, and that tropical storms are occasional -- two hurricanes brushed the island in their early stages late in the 2020 season. Sea temperatures have risen by at least 1.3 degrees since the 1950s. The island is in an active seismic zone.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Aruba's biodiversity is that of a dry island on the South American shelf, and most of what is native survives in the Arikok National Park, 34 square kilometres established in 2000 over about a fifth of the island's land. The park's rock outcrops make microclimates in which the island's endemics live: the cascabel, the Aruban rattlesnake; the santanero, Baker's cat-eyed snake; the kododo blauw, the Aruban whiptail lizard; and among birds the shoco, the Aruban burrowing owl, and the prikichi, the Aruban parakeet. The landscape is cactus and the wind-bent divi-divi, the watapana whose pods gave the island a tannin trade, and the arid look owes as much to Spanish-era deforestation and goats as to the 500 millimetres of rain.

The Conchi natural pool in the park's north conservation zone, named for the turtles that once used it, sits in pillow lava on the battered north coast; the reefs lie off the calmer south-west. The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no fuller inventory, and none is invented here.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file.

The animals a visitor may see are the park's: the Aruban whiptail lizard on every rock, the burrowing owl at its holes in the terraces, the parakeet in the cactus, and -- rarely, and to be left alone -- the cascabel rattlesnake and the cat-eyed snake, both endemic. Goats are everywhere and are not wildlife. The reef fish of the south-west and the turtles for which the Conchi pool was named are in the sources by name only, and no count is offered.

The practical zoology is the advisories': animals on the road, and coastal waters where rescue may not meet the standards visitors expect.