Aruba historical timeline

Aruba's history is that of a dry island nobody wanted much until oil and then sun made it valuable, and of a people who then insisted on running it themselves. What a visitor sees -- the chapel at Alto Vista, the gold ruins in the park, the refinery at San Nicolas, the Status Aparte monument in Oranjestad -- is the record.

Chronology

1. before 2000 BC Archaic-age tools at 33 sites, one at Arikok older than the rest, mark visits or settlement from the mainland; the Caquetío, an Arawak people, are on the island when Alonso de Ojeda arrives and give it a name meaning well-situated island.
2. c. 900 A.D. Caquetío people migrate from western Venezuela, probably from the Paraguaná and Guajira peninsulas, to the Leeward Antilles between 850 and 1000 AD, and the archaic population disappears from the Aruban archaeological record around 950. The Caquetío spoke an Arawakan language, and their word for the island -- Oruba, well-situated island -- is most likely where the name Aruba comes from. Their chiefdom was built on political and religious alliance rather than military control, and it stretched across Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire and the Venezuelan coast.
3. 1636 The Dutch from Curaçao occupy Aruba and Bonaire; the island is run for cattle, salt and dyewood, its salt pans yielding poor salt sufficient only for local use.
4. 1806 The British take the island during the Napoleonic Wars and hold it until 1816, returning it under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814; Aruba is folded into the Colony of Curaçao and Dependencies.
5. 1824 Gold is discovered on Aruba by a 12-year-old herder named Willem Rasmijn, setting off the Aruban Gold Rush. The common belief that the island's name comes from the Spanish oro hubo, "there was gold once", is a misconception -- the gold was found three centuries after the name -- but the rush is real, and it is the island's only industry between the salt pans and the refinery.
6. 1924 The Lago Oil and Transport Company, a Standard Oil subsidiary, builds a refinery at San Nicolas that grows into one of the largest in the world; the Arend company follows at Oranjestad in 1927, and workers arrive from across the Caribbean.
7. 1942 The oil facilities, placed under the administration of the Dutch government-in-exile in London in 1940, are attacked by the German navy on 16 February 1942, in Operation Neuland. U-156 surfaced two miles off Aruba after nightfall on 15 February and opened its attack at 01:31; British troops had occupied Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire soon after the Netherlands fell. Britain needed four tankers of petroleum a day in the early war years and most of it came through these two islands once Italy closed the Mediterranean, which is why a small Caribbean island was worth a U-boat patrol.
8. 1947 Aruba drafts its first constitution for a separate status and founds a tourist board; the Charter of the Kingdom of 1954 instead puts it in the new Netherlands Antilles.
9. 1971 Betico Croes builds the Status Aparte movement through the 1970s, campaigning for Aruba to leave the Netherlands Antilles while staying inside the Kingdom -- separation from Curaçao rather than from the Netherlands, which is the distinction the island's politics still turns on. He was seriously injured in a traffic accident in 1985 and slipped into a coma, and did not see the separate status take effect.
10. 1985 Aruba's oil refinery closes. It was a significant blow to an economy built on refining since 1924, and the response was a deliberate push into tourism, which has since expanded to become the island's largest industry. The resort strip, the cruise terminal and the share of the workforce in hospitality all date from this decision rather than from anything older, and it happened in the same year as the constitution.
11. 1986 After Betico Croes's Status Aparte movement of the 1970s, Aruba drafts a constitution in August 1985, unanimously approved, and after the 1985 general election for its first parliament leaves the Antilles on 1 January and becomes a constituent country of the Kingdom, with full independence then planned for 1996 and never taken, introducing the florin the same year at par with the old guilder and pegged at 1.79 to the US dollar.
12. 2000 Arikok National Park is established over about a fifth of the island; the refinery closes in 2009; the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010 makes Aruba's status the norm for the Kingdom's Caribbean countries.

What survived, and how

The Caquetío survived in the island's name and its place-names -- Jamanota, Arikok, Hooiberg's neighbours -- and in the language's borrowed words. The refinery town survived as a Carnival culture after the oil went. The dry interior survived because it was worthless until a park made it precious.

What did not survive is the forest: the arid landscape is as much the Spanish colonisation's work as the climate's.