Curaçao Geography, Climate & Nature

Curaçao lies on the continental shelf of South America in the southern Caribbean, north of Venezuela and south-east of Aruba, with Bonaire to its east: 444 square kilometres of hilly, dry limestone and volcanic rock, longest from north-west to south-east, with the leeward south-west coast of bays and beaches and a windward north coast of cliffs and blowholes. Its highest point is Christoffelberg, 1,239 feet, in the Christoffel park at the north-western end. Klein Curaçao, 1.7 square kilometres and uninhabited, lies ten kilometres off the south-east with a lighthouse, a beach house, a reef and a graveyard of wrecked boats on its windward side.

Willemstad, on the south coast, holds about 90 per cent of the population -- 136,660 people in 2011 -- around the Sint Anna Bay, the inlet that leads into the great natural harbour of the Schottegat where the refinery stands; its four historic quarters are Punda and Otrobanda on either side of the bay and Scharloo and Pietermaai on the smaller Waaigat. The airport at Hato, the island's only one, is 12 kilometres north of the city on the north coast, with the third-longest commercial runway in the Caribbean and about two million passengers a year.

The island lies outside the main development region for tropical cyclones and no hurricane has made landfall since records began, though tropical storms pass; it is, the Canadian advisory notes, in an active seismic zone.

Curaçao is a dry island on the South American shelf: Klein Curaçao's climate is classed as desert, with evaporation exceeding rainfall, and the main island's cactus scrub and divi-divi trees tell the same story. The trade wind blows steadily and the heat is constant, which is why the Christoffel park closes its mountain climb to anyone starting after 10 am. The encyclopaedia's temperature and rainfall figures sit in templates that did not survive fetching, and none are repeated here.

What the sources do say is about storms. Curaçao lies outside the main development region for tropical cyclones and no hurricane has made landfall since the US National Hurricane Center began tracking them, though the island has been brushed by pre-hurricane tropical storms; the advisories give the season as June to November, note that most hurricanes pass well to the north, and add that the island is in an active seismic zone.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Curaçao's protected nature is concentrated in the Christoffel park at the island's north-western end, part of the national park system since 1978: 1,860 hectares, 1,040 of them nature reserve, around Christoffelberg and three former plantations, forming part of the North-east Curaçao parks and coast Important Bird Area. The park has more biodiversity than anywhere else on the island -- three species of pillar cactus (datu, kadushi and kadushi di pushi) growing to ten feet, divi-divi trees, and several extremely rare orchids -- and the park itself names the white-tailed deer as the national animal that lives there.

Offshore the inheritance is the reef: Klein Curaçao's coral and underwater caves are the island's best-known dive, and the leeward bays carry reef close to shore. The Spanish introduced horses, sheep, goats, pigs and cattle after 1499, and the goats in particular have shaped the dry scrub ever since. The encyclopaedia pages opened for this page carry no fuller species inventory, and none is invented here.

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

The animals a visitor can hope for are the Christoffel park's white-tailed deer, the birds of the north-east Important Bird Area, and the reef life off Klein Curaçao and the west-coast bays; the sea turtles and flamingos of the ABC islands are here as they are on Bonaire, but no sentence opened for this page places them on Curaçao, so they stay out. The goats are everywhere and are not wildlife.

The practical zoology is the advisories': animals on the road, coastal waters that can be dangerous with rescue not guaranteed, and a strict ban on leaving with corals or conch shells.