Landhuizen: Curaçao's Plantation Houses

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Ascencion: One of Curaçao's Oldest Plantations

Landhuis Ascencion towers above the surrounding green hills with its striking red-and-white shutters, a landmark visible from the road long before you reach the gates. The estate takes its name from a small indigenous settlement that once stood here: Pueblo de la Madre de Dios Ascencion, whose natural freshwater spring made the site valuable long before European arrival. Jurriaan Janszoon Exteen founded the plantation in 1672; the landhuis followed soon after. Its most distinctive architectural feature is a pair of imposing corner towers flanking the terrace, one of the few examples on Curaçao, which originally provided extra storage below and housed the plantation's pigeons on top, a food source kept by every self-respecting plantation owner of the era. The consistent water supply allowed sorghum, indigo, cotton, and later aloe to be cultivated, alongside herds of goats, sheep, cattle, and horses. Ascencion's fortunes rose again in 1884 when phosphate was discovered on the Seru Mainshi, part of the estate. The Curaçaosche Phosphaat Maatschappij Ascencion was founded the same year to exploit the find, part of an island-wide phosphate boom that followed the 1874 discovery on the Tafelberg near Santa Barbara. The current appearance owes much to architect Serge Alexeenko, who restored the house in 1963-1964: the sandglass motif on the shutters is his addition, not historically original, but widely accepted as part of the landhuis' look today. The house stands on a raised terrace on the north side of the road to Westpunt, just before you reach Barber. Its plan is the classic Curaçao one: a rectangular core with an attic, wrapped on all four sides by galleries (covered verandas) under lower sloping roofs, with four dormers, small windows set into the roof, on each side of the main roof. The end walls rise into funnel-shaped gables, each finished with a small triangular pediment, a low decorative crown, and a corral, a magasina (storehouse) and a cistern survive among the outbuildings.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Barber: Seminary, Then School, and the Oldest Tree on Curaçao

Plantage Barber was founded in 1711 by Barbara Boom-Exteen, daughter of the owner of Ascencion. At 283 hectares, it produced mainly wool and later attempted sisal cultivation. The landhuis has an upper storey added later atop the original core: a second floor built in 1833 when priest Niewindt bought the estate to convert it into a seminary and school. The priest-students lived on the new upper level. After the plantation was sold to the government in 1913, the landhuis remained property of the Roman Catholic church. Behind it lies the Hòfi Pastor nature park, an old orchard that still harbours what is reputedly the oldest tree on Curaçao: worth the walk for the botanical weight of it alone. The early 19th-century landhuis has a two-storey core with saddle roof (no dormers), and galleries along both long sides (northern narrower than southern). The Webata maps of the era show something unusual: Landhuis Barber stood outside the formal boundaries of its own plantation, which speaks to how the colonial landscape was organised by watershed and road more than by neat parcel lines. The land Barbara took over in 1711 had been pasture of Leliënberg, a West India Company plantation, and was also known as Cabrietenberg. The register adds that the church kept the house as its parsonage, the priest's residence. On the south front a central double door sits between three tall windows on each side, four square sash windows (panes that slide up and down) light the upper floor, and inside, arched openings join the core to the galleries.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Bever: Named After Its Army Surgeon

Originally the estate was called Buena Vista, 'beautiful view' in Spanish, and for good reason. From the hill on which Bever sits, the countryside opens out in every direction. On the grounds lie two graves of the Van Oxfort family: Jan Pietersz van Oxfort, his wife Johanna Mattias, and their son Thomas, both men 'cornet over de ruyterye' (cavalry cornets) in the 17th century. A hurricane in 1681 damaged the original house so badly that the West India Company director asked Jan Pietersz to rebuild: the old house stood too close to the soldiers' quarters. Local tradition holds that the current landhuis is that Pietersz rebuild, adapted and extended around 1800 by Jacob Jessurun Sasportas. The name Bever comes from Daniel Beevers, chief surgeon of the local militia (Schutterij) from 1828 to 1840, who owned the estate during those years. In 1867 the house was 'repaired and put in best order'. It had a small orchard with fruit trees and a well with good drinking water. By the mid-20th century, Bever was the country home of Benny Maduro; the wells by then yielded only brackish water. The house has a vestibule with a semi-circular entrance stair and symmetrical flower beds on either side, edged with ijsselsteentjes: the small yellow Dutch bricks shipped as ship ballast. A partial restoration in 2016 returned the house to life. The monument register calls the two 17th-century graves the oldest on Curaçao and points out that the house stands near the site of the earliest Dutch fortification on the island. The register is more cautious about the age of the house: going by the surviving deeds, it dates the present building entirely to the 19th century, with the front section and the additions on the east and north sides built in the second half of that century. Cylindrical wells at the front and at the rear corners, a cistern and a wooden servants' quarters complete the grounds.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Bloemhof: Country House Turned Cultural Garden

Step through the wrought-iron gate (porta di heru) at Bloemhof today and you understand immediately why this estate was treasured as a country retreat for two centuries. The seven-hectare grounds still offer fresh air, quiet, and space: the same qualities that drew wealthy Willemstad families out of the stuffy city back when the drive took hours rather than minutes. The oldest preserved deed for Bloemhof dates to 1735. The present landhuis is nineteenth-century; by the time Emma Lopez Penha bought it in 1919, the plantation had already changed hands twenty-two times. Bloemhof produced rainwater and Laraha oranges (whose peels, essential for Blue Curaçao liqueur, were dried along the path leading up to the house from the Santa Rosaweg), but it was always primarily a buitenhuis, a country house, rather than a serious agricultural operation. Emma's granddaughter May Henriquez, herself a sculptor, transformed Bloemhof's creative life in the twentieth century. Working from the estate's old carriage house as her studio (preserved today in its original state), she turned the landhuis into a gathering place for Curaçao's artists. Exhibitions, theatre performances, and concerts became regular events. Gallery De Boog, founded by May with Ben Smit and Barbara Smeets, operated from the grounds in the 1960s. After May's death in 1999, her family chose to preserve that creative spirit: the landhuis was restored and reopened as Fundashon Bloemhof, a cultural centre hosting exhibitions of local and international artists, workshops, and public events. The old mangasinas became depots, archives, a library, and meeting rooms. On the foundations of a demolished family house, the artist Herman van Bergen began in 2014 to build his extraordinary Kathedraal van Doornen, the 'Cathedral of Thorns', made entirely of sumpiña, the spines of the wabi (Acacia tortuosa) tree. Sculptures by other artists dot the grounds. Walking routes wind through the plantation, passing a hidden stone bath-house with two reclining tubs fed by an aquaduct from a neighbouring well: a small reminder of how different nineteenth-century luxury looked. In the 18th century the estate was known for a time as Nooitgedacht, and besides serving as a country house it grew vegetables and fruit, partly for the household and partly for sale in town. The main house is laid out symmetrically: a two-storey core between single-storey open galleries, with two side wings set crosswise at the east end. Its gables (the upper part of the end walls) and the tops of the three dormers (windows set into the roof) on each roof slope have the outline of a flattened pointed arch, and each dormer top holds a rosette of flowers and tendrils.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Bloempot: Too Small to Be a Plantation

Landhuis Bloempot sits behind one of Curaçao's more charming arguments about terminology. The estate was named after one of its earliest owners, Aron Henriquez Moron, who arrived on Curaçao in 1730 at age twenty, married Esther Penso, and went to work for his wealthy brother-in-law Mosseh Penso. He branched out into ship-owning, freight, and marine insurance, and bought Bloempot in 1754: undoubtedly as a country house, not a plantation. He held it for thirty years. That Bloempot was too small to count as a plantation was argued convincingly a century later by its then-owner, Moses Cohen Henriquez. In a letter to De Curaçaosche Courant defending the appraisal of his estate, he made the case that Bloempot could never be compared to, say, Klein Sint Joris. Sint Joris, he wrote, had room for fields of sorghum, beans, and peanuts; Bloempot barely had space for 'a quarter pint of corn'. The coconut palms and citrus trees had all died after he bought the place in 1833. Total annual fruit income: 450 gulden. 'This little summer place,' he concluded, 'in no way deserves the name plantation.' The current landhuis is privately inhabited. Two neoclassical blocks compose it; striking ornaments top the outermost corners of the front facade, and a triangular fronton above holds a medallion depicting a flowerpot with flowers: the estate's namesake, in stone. Empty flowerpots decorate the gate pillars to the left. To the right, the large rainwater reservoir has a handsome gabled roof. Cohen Henriquez, incidentally, was a key figure in the 1864 split within the Jewish community that led to the founding of Temple Emanu-el in Willemstad. The register dates the present buildings to the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. The house has a single storey: a core and a front gallery (a covered veranda) under hipped roofs, which slope down on all four sides, and two short wings at the back under plain pitched roofs. On the front a central door has two windows on either side, and the corner ornaments are balls set on top of pilasters, flat columns that stand slightly proud of the wall.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Bona Vista: Built of Dutch Ship-Ballast Bricks

Bona Vista, also historically Ons Tuintjie or Vriendenwijck, sits on a remarkably abundant water source, which defined its whole economic history. During its working centuries the estate had enough water to grow crops and maintain a substantial livestock herd; by the late 19th century, exporting fresh water to Punda (Willemstad) had become its main source of income. One of the more quietly strategic estates on the island. The landhuis is an architectural oddity for Curaçao: U-shaped with a saddle roof but no dormer windows, and almost all its walls built from ijsselstenen. The small yellow bricks from IJsselstein in the Netherlands that arrived as ballast in sailing ships. Using them for wall construction, rather than just the usual foundational courses, sets Bona Vista apart, although its facades are plastered and painted. The facade features a unique undulating gable with an arched top finish: elegant, unusual, and specific to this landhuis. The plantation is mentioned on 1820 maps. Property of a ship captain at the end of the 19th century. The monument register reads the house as four parts that were probably built one after another: first the core with its rear gallery, possibly 18th century, then two rear wings, then the middle of the front section in the second half of the 19th century, and only around 1930 to 1940 the corner pieces that flank it. A semicircular terrace curves around the front and side, and the grounds keep a separate kitchen building and a coach house that also served as a horse stable.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Brakkeput Abou: Rubber and Turtles

The original Brakkeput was named after the brackish-water well on the plantation. Over time it was split into three separate estates: Abou ('below'), Ariba ('above'), and Mei Mei ('middle'). Each with its own landhuis. Brakkeput Abou, bearing the date 1795 on the house, was never really a working plantation. Instead it has an oddly specific experimental history: in the 20th century successive owners tried to cultivate rubber plants and farm sea turtles on the grounds. Neither caught on commercially. Architecturally the house is a mix of several periods. It is T-shaped with a high saddle roof crowned by dormer windows of varying widths. A half-gallery runs along the north side. A secondary addition extends from the crossbar of the T on the north side, and a saddle-roofed gallery wraps the western and part of the southern elevations. It reads like what it is: a country retreat adapted again and again over two centuries, each generation leaving its mark. Today the landhuis is fully restored and functions as a private residence. You cannot go inside, but from the approach road the layering of the different building phases is clearly legible. Also known in earlier documents as 'Rust en Vrede' and 'Rust van Bonaire': names whose disappearance into 'Brakkeput Abou' says something about how Papiamentu practicality tends to win over pretty-sounding Dutch. The monument register distinguishes three building phases: the western part, the oldest, follows the traditional plan of a core between front and rear galleries; the middle part, whose gables (the upper end walls) curve inward, is also 18th century; and the eastern part comes from a third phase, dated by the year 1877 in the facade. Of the three Brakkeput estates north of Spaanse Water this is the most westerly, set on the edge of a rise that falls toward the bay between two rooien, dry streambeds that only carry water after rain.

Landhuis Brakkeput Ariba: From Merchants' Retreat to School

Brakkeput Ariba, 'above' in Papiamentu, is the upper of the three post-split Brakkeput estates. The original plantation was a single unit, named for its brackish-water well, before being divided in three in the 19th century. Ariba was probably a country retreat for city merchants from the start, used as an escape from the heat and crowding of Willemstad rather than a serious agricultural operation. Architecturally the house began as a U-shape around a patio; later the patio was roofed over, creating a contained central space. The house has a hipped roof without dormer windows, unusual for a Curaçao landhuis, and above the main entrance on the north side an extension rests on two columns, a 20th-century addition that changed the entrance rhythm significantly. In the first half of the 20th century the Kruisvaarders van Sint Jan, a Catholic teaching order, took possession. They ran a vocational school here for boys who could not attend the main trade schools in the city, teaching practical skills in what had been a merchant's summer retreat. The school closed decades ago. Brakkeput Ariba is now dormant, awaiting its next purpose. Like many Curaçao landhuizen, it has moved through cycles (agriculture, leisure, education, waiting) and the building survives each transition. The 19th-century bones are still intact.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Brakkeput Mei Mei: From Plantation to CPIM Clubhouse to Nightlife

Brakkeput Mei Mei, 'Brakkeput middle', is the third of the post-split Brakkeput estates, between Abou and Ariba, all three named after the shared brackish-water well that once defined the parent plantation. On Mei Mei the crops were maize and beans; livestock grazed the surrounding land; and at one point lime was burned here for mortar and whitewash production. A plantation with multiple small revenue streams rather than one big commodity play. The landhuis was originally U-shaped. It has a corrugated-metal saddle roof (a relatively modern replacement) with some dormer windows, and a lean-to-roofed gallery along the front. The estate was once a country retreat for Willemstad merchants. In the mid-20th century it served as a clubhouse for employees of CPIM (Curaçaosche Petroleum Industrie Maatschappij): a characteristic Curaçao mid-century use, turning old plantation houses into social venues for oil-industry workers. For many years now Brakkeput Mei Mei has been a popular restaurant and nightlife venue, one of the few landhuizen on the south-east where you can actually go in for dinner or a drink on a Friday night. The restored building is privately operated; the patio has become a dance floor; the 'Brakkeput' name now stands for night out rather than agricultural sweat. The register places the layout of the house in the second half of the 19th century; after 1950 it was thoroughly repaired, keeping its main form, though all the roofs were renewed. It stands on a raised platform on a hilltop south of the road to Jan Sofat, with a core between galleries, two short cross wings at the east end, and a cistern and two outbuildings nearby. You approach from the west, but the register thinks the east side is the real front, because the large terrace lies there.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Brievengat: The Cultural Heart of Curaçao

Few landhuizen have flirted with demolition and come back as cultural icons quite like Brievengat. Built around 1750 on the plains northeast of Willemstad, the estate was alternately known as 'De Hoop' ('The Hope') in its early years: a name that would prove prophetic. In 1847, a young Hague-born Dutchman named Cornelis Janszoon Sprock bought the neglected plantation, restored its buildings, and brought new land under cultivation. Under his direction Brievengat flourished. But the twentieth century was less kind: Shell acquired the estate in 1927, convinced it held groundwater essential for the oil refinery at Isla. The water turned out not to exist, and a costly strategic error loomed. Worse was the aftermath: by the early 1950s the once-proud landhuis stood in ruins, and Shell was preparing to demolish it. What followed is Curaçao's most celebrated preservation story. A group of concerned residents founded Stichting Monumentenzorg Curaçao in 1954 specifically to save Brievengat. They bought it from Shell for a symbolic one guilder. A 75,000-guilder gift from industrialist Bernard van Leer funded a full restoration by architect Serge Alexeenko, completed in 1955, that returned the house to its 18th-century glory. For decades afterwards Brievengat was the island's premier cultural venue. Under proprietor René Hoetjes it hosted Friday-night Indonesian rijsttafel followed by open-air dancing to the house band, The Happy Peanuts. Cruise passengers came by day for folklore performances in the gardens. The dances ended in 2002, and since then the landhuis has cycled through various uses. It is currently vacant but remains one of the island's architectural jewels: a complete 18th-century plantation complex with main house, slave quarters, and grounds, all intact and open to visit. Along the front runs an open gallery of sixteen shallow arches on square columns, and the wide terrace before it has a tower at each of its two corners. The gables (the upper end walls) have S-curved edges with scrolls, a round window and a rounded top, and four dormers, windows set in the roof, sit on each side of the main roof. Behind the house a 19th-century kitchen is linked by a covered passage, and among the corrals, magasina (storehouse) and cisterns on the grounds stands a lime kiln, a structure that has become rare on Curaçao.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Cas Abou: Several Names, One Famous Beach

Landhuis Cas Abou has one of the more confusing histories on Curaçao, starting with its names. The plantation was long called Engelenberg, and Giftenberg may have been another name for the same estate. Tradition links the name Engelenberg to Willebrord van Engelen, temporarily director of the Dutch West India Company, but when the plantation was founded is not known. The nickname 'e kas abou', 'the other house' over there, is said to have belonged first to the Giftenberg house before it somehow passed to this landhuis, whose building date is also unknown. Language is unreliable that way. By the early 1960s Cas Abou was a ruin. Architect Serge Alexeenko restored it. One of the more unusual survivals on the grounds is the original privy (wc-huisje): a two-seater positioned on the western side, downwind from the house, because colonial architects had practical priorities. There is also a carriage house and the remains of a mangasina. A project developer took ownership in 1980 with big plans that came to nothing. In 1991 the Dutch Antilles civil servants' pension fund took over. Two years later a small hotel with restaurant opened in the landhuis and promptly closed. Today the landhuis stands empty, awaiting restoration and new purpose. But the beach directly below it, Cas Abou Beach, is one of Curaçao's most popular strands. Soft white sand, calm turquoise water, and a reef just offshore. The landhuis may be sleeping, but the bay below is wide awake. The first known deed of sale dates from 1719, when Mathijs Brugman bought Engelenberg from Benjamin de Casseres; a deed of 1838 still uses that name, while agreements from 1864 already speak of Cas Abao. The Werbata map of 1906 to 1909 shows several stone and loam buildings inside a living hedge near the landhuis, probably kunuku houses (small farm cottages) or former dwellings of enslaved people, and the register also notes a salt pan in the southwest corner of the old plantation. The coach house comes with a threshing floor, a hard, flat surface where grain was beaten from the harvested stalks.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Cas Cora: Cattle Farm Turned Experimental Breeder

Cas Cora (on older maps Cas Koraal, meaning 'house of the corral' in a mix of Spanish and Dutch) is a 19th-century landhuis that sat on an 85-hectare cattle plantation. The operation was primarily livestock-based; in the mid-20th century it briefly became a specialised cattle-breeding facility, a short chapter in its long, mostly quiet history. The landhuis has a simple, practical architecture. Saddle roof, no dormer windows, lean-to galleries along both long sides. A rear extension and a large covered canopy have been added behind the main building: the kind of modest, functional expansions that have supported continued use over decades. The estate has also been known as Vredenberg and as Penso's Park, successive names that accumulate on a Curaçao landhuis like sediment. Cas Cora's current use is unclear, but the building itself remains in good structural condition, a testament to the usefulness of simple forms that don't try to be grander than they are. The monument register places the estate north of the Reigerweg, reaching as far as Jongbloed and the Kabouterbos, with the house on a gentle rise just south of the fertile ground; only about 6 of the original 85 hectares remain. On the grounds stand a cistern that doubles as a store, two magasinas (storehouses) and the ruin of a third, a shed, a small house for the vitó or overseer, and several wells with water troughs. The front has a central double door with a window on each side, facing a garden split into three by two low walls, and some of the shutters still hang on their old pin hinges.

Landhuis Cerito: Quiet in the Centre

Cerito (also spelled Cerrito, 'little hill' in Spanish) is one of the smaller and lesser-known landhuizen of central Curaçao. The estate and its house sit on gently raised ground that gave the plantation its name. Among the 78 intact landhuizen it is neither the oldest, nor the grandest, nor the most story-rich, but it belongs squarely in the continuous story of the island's plantation past, and its presence on the list matters. The landhuis has gone through the familiar Curaçao cycle: established as a working plantation with livestock, small-scale crops, and a supporting household staff; transformed in the 20th century as the economic basis for plantations evaporated; now preserved more by inertia than by active restoration. What survives is typical of the mid-scale Curaçaose landhuis: a rectangular main house with surrounding gallery, supporting outbuildings some of which are intact, some lost. Cerito illustrates an important truth about Curaçao's landhuizen catalogue: the famous estates (Brievengat, Chobolobo, Kenepa) represent maybe a dozen out of roughly 95 sites catalogued in the authoritative book. The other 80+ are smaller, quieter, less visited, but each holds a piece of the story. Cerito is one of those quieter pieces. The book of Curaçao history is not only written in capitals.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Chobolobo: Home of Blue Curaçao

Landhuis Chobolobo, just southeast of Schottegat, is arguably Curaçao's most famous plantation house, not for its age or grandeur, but for what comes out of its copper kettles. This is the only place on Earth where real Blue Curaçao liqueur is distilled, a process unchanged since the late nineteenth century when pharmacists Isaac Chumaceiro and Edgar Senior first experimented with the bitter peels of the Laraha orange at their Botica Excelsior on Heerenstraat. The estate itself began as a country retreat, not a working plantation. Early records list it as 'De Zoutpan' (The Salt Pan), for the natural depression beside it, and later as 'Sebollobo': the name used in 1796 by its then-owner, a free woman of colour named Anna Matthew, possibly of indigenous Arawak descent. By the time the traveller M.D. Teenstra catalogued it in 1836, it was already a 'tuintje', a small genteel garden estate rather than a sugar or salt operation. The transformation to distillery came in 1947, when Senior & Co bought out the Chumaceiro widow, keeper of the original family recipe, and moved production to Chobolobo's old mangasinas (storage sheds). Architect Johan Heinrich Werner renovated the house the same year. The original plan for a tasting room didn't pencil out commercially, so in early 1949 it opened instead as a nightclub, hosting dances under the Caribbean stars. Today Chobolobo hosts daily guided tours that walk visitors through the 1896 copper still (still in use), the botanical story of the Laraha, a bitter orange found nowhere else, and a tasting of every colour variant of the liqueur, only one of which is actually blue. A 2014 restoration turned the old storage buildings into a museum and information centre; the following year, architect Anko van der Woude added a contemporary café behind the landhuis, its sweeping roof hovering over the terrace as a striking modern counterpoint to the 19th-century walls. The house is also recorded as Uitzicht, and the register finds it hard to date: the wide front section looks like work from the third quarter of the 19th century, while the southern part is older, possibly early 19th century, and may have begun as a single-storey core with galleries on two sides. The roofs are covered with old Dutch tiles painted black, a cistern with an aqueduct stands on the grounds, and the kitchen oven juts out from the west side. Most windows are sash windows (panes that slide up and down) with wooden outside shutters, propped open with small wooden sticks known as soldaatjes, little soldiers.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Daniel: From Bad Soil to Best Breakfast

Daniel was originally called Malpais, 'bad land', because the soil here never really produced much. The current name comes from Daniel Ellis, founder of the plantation, who bought the land from the government in 1711. His first name stuck; the nickname faded. The plantation's 19th-century history is unusually interesting because twice, formerly enslaved people came to own it. Lourens Serni, manumitted in 1850, bought Daniel in 1867 and held it for at least twenty years. By 1873 he was running some 800 goats and sheep and around 40 cattle across the land. He was a butcher by trade; he and partner C. Maduro advertised 'best vleesch' (best meat) in the Curaçao newspaper. Adolph van Uytrecht, born into slavery in 1858 as the son of plantation owner Willem van Uytrecht and his enslaved partner Françoise Sera na la Condé, inherited enough after his father's 1893 death to buy Daniel a year later. By the time contractor H.J.M. van Lieshout acquired the landhuis in 1976 it was nearly a ruin: only the walls stood. His full restoration with antique Curaçao furniture returned the 17th-century estate to glory. Brief owners followed including Dutch television director Jef Rademakers. Since 1997 the property has belonged to Jan Francke, who immediately built a large covered terrace in front of the house (obscuring the two dormer windows, a controversial choice quickly followed by the landhuis being declared a protected monument). Today Daniel is a restaurant with a few apartments and an art gallery showing works by local artists and Francke himself. The monument register counts Daniel among the oldest country houses on Curaçao, and the partition wall inside the core and the cross-built front section on the north side point to two building phases. The steep roofs end in funnel-shaped gables (the upper parts of the end walls), on the core topped with an arched pediment in classical style; the cornices along the gutters and the kitchen extension are 19th-century changes, while the roof and dormers were replaced in the second half of the 20th century. Corrals and the remains of a magasina, a plantation storehouse, still stand nearby.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis De Goede Hoop: Three Generations, One Family

Landhuis De Goede Hoop, also known as Popo, sits splendidly on a hill, built around a core with four surrounding galleries. The 20th century added a pillared canopy over the large front terrace. There was already a house here before 1800. The 1776 sale deed listed it as 'opstal van huisinge, een mangasina en een duivenhok': farm house, a storage shed, and a dovecote. It was probably always more country retreat than working plantation, though as late as 1926 the owners retained the privilege of 'grazing 50 sheep on the public lands'. Between 1767 and 1967 the estate had eighteen different owners. Bernardus Anthony Cancrijn, member of the colonial Raad van Politie, bought it in 1807, mostly as an investment, since he lived in Scharloo's Van den Brandhofstraat. With the estate he acquired 'one black man, one donkey cart, two mares, two donkeys, and various garden tools'. Later in the 19th century the estate passed to Mondecir Martinus Ecker, born into slavery, whose wife Dorothea Hipólita Leon was an extramarital but acknowledged daughter of Anton Leon, grandfather of the current owner. De Goede Hoop changed hands within the Leon family to Bernardus, who found it 'in a very poor state of repair' when he bought it. He rented out the landhuis until 1962, when his son Sergio returned from the United States with his American wife to open a gynaecological practice on Curaçao. Sergio moved into De Goede Hoop, fulfilling a childhood dream. He has maintained the estate and its grounds immaculately; countless antique pieces fill the interior, many restored by Leon himself. A swimming pool halfway up the hill is his one modern addition. The continuity here (three generations, same family, same house) is rare on Curaçao. The monument register reads the neoclassical decoration, inside and out, as late 19th-century work, though the core of the house may be older. The core carries a small hipped roof, sloping on all four sides and topped with two finials (ornamental tips), and the outer corners show toothed quoins, corner blocks set in alternating lengths. A curved stair climbs to the terrace, where a kitchen with a fogon, the traditional open cooking hearth, is built against the north gallery, and on the east side lies a partly underground cistern.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Dokterstuin: From Doctor's Garden to Krioyo Restaurant

The name goes back to one of the earliest owners: the doctor Jan Bernagie, who received the plantation from his brother Bastiaan at the end of the 17th century. It was the doctor's garden, 'hofje', hence Dokterstuin. The name has outlasted the doctor by more than three centuries. Mid-19th century the government bought Dokterstuin and neighbouring Pannekoek from Hendrik de Quartel, because Pannekoek became the residence of the district master of the fifth district, Jan Jacob van Dam. Dokterstuin, Van Dam reported, was so far gone that the house might as well be demolished. In 1864 the roof tiles were stripped and moved to Pannekoek. Dokterstuin kept only a police post, where marechaussees checked transport permits: needed because district residents transporting plantation products to the city were suspected of theft. When in 1871 the district master again had to arrange his own housing, the government sold Dokterstuin and Pannekoek to Willem Simon 'shon Wilmu' da Costa Gomez. Almost nothing of the old landhuis was left, so shon Wilmu built the current house around 1880. The 20th century cycled through: government doctor's practice (1976 to late 1980s), school (1968-1974, closed due to structural decay), collapsed roof (again), restoration funded by Mama Bebi Mogen (1995), and today a genuine krioyo restaurant run by her daughter Daisy. Where the kitchen stood in district master Van Eps's time, the bar now pours. The sala retains its Curaçaoan furniture. Guests eat outside under a shaded canopy, right where the district master's chickens once scratched. Besides 1880, the monument register lists 1914 and 1918 among the building dates. The house is laid out along one long axis: a two-storey core under a hipped roof, which slopes down on all four sides, rises above single-storey wings at each end and above the front and rear galleries. A small terrace with a stone stair sits at the centre of the front, with further terraces at the corners.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Gaito: Quiet Symmetry and a Weathervane's Name

From 1783 for a century Gaito was owned by the same hands as Groot Kwartier. Martha Elisabeth Lamont, who owned both plantations, preferred to live on Gaito in 1830: an interesting vote of confidence for the smaller estate. Whether she lived in the same house that stands today is an open question. A plan drawn in 1758 by Jan Esdré, son of the then-owner, shows a different house along with a dovecote, a mangasina with threshing floor and corn store, and the slave quarters. When the traveller M.D. Teenstra passed by around 1832 he dismissed Gaito as 'a minor garden'. Yet the estate was still running as a cattle farm well into the 20th century: a mid-century photograph shows cows walking behind the elegant landhuis, with a formal ornamental garden laid out in front. The current landhuis is probably 19th-century. Modest curled ornaments decorate the gables and stylised flower motifs sit above the windows. A stately 20th-century addition brought the pillared entrance and a generous balcony in front; two more pillars at the rear support a slightly smaller back balcony. The current owner, the Advent Zendingsgenootschap (Adventist Mission Society), has restored the estate beautifully. According to Father Brenneker, a water tank with a weathervane, a gaíto in the local vernacular, once stood in front of the house. That is where the name came from. Its floor plan is almost square: a two-storey core between strikingly wide single-storey galleries, each under a lean-to roof, a roof that slopes one way, down from the wall of the core. The core's roof of red tiles has a single dormer, a small upright window set into the roof slope, on each side, while pilaster strips, flat pillars that barely stand out from the wall, mark the corners of the front. The front balcony rests on Tuscan columns, a simple classical column type, terraces with balustrades run along the front and the back, and a cistern stands beside the house.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Groot Davelaar: The Octagonal Heart and a President's Legend

Groot Davelaar stands out architecturally among Curaçao's landhuizen for one striking reason: an octagonal core surrounded by a gallery, with another gallery wrapping three sides beyond. Small extensions on the north and south sides, with a further north extension, give the whole house the footprint of a lowercase 'b' from above. On the upper floor, under an eight-sided pyramid roof, an octagonal room with a balustrade crowns the entire composition. And unlike every other landhuis on the island, Groot Davelaar still has its name painted across the facade: a small architectural defiance of Curaçao's usual understatement. The origin stories dance. One legend claims the house was built around 1865 for the exiled revolutionary Antonio Guzmán Blanco, later President of Venezuela, as a private retreat during his time on the island. The more credible version, backed by records, places construction in 1873-1874 on the orders of Juan R. Blanch. The surname Davelaar (from a family that also named the neighbouring Klein Davelaar) gave the estate its lasting name. The romantic Venezuelan-president origin story persists, though, because nineteenth-century Curaçao really did shelter political exiles from across Latin America, and because the octagonal core looks exactly like the kind of architectural ambition a would-be president might commission. Whatever its origins, Groot Davelaar today is privately owned. The grounds are immaculate; the painted name on the facade remains legible; the octagonal upper room, just visible from the approach road, is a small architectural secret you can keep spotting on repeat visits. The design is credited to A. Martis, a supervisor who was also acting director of the building department, and the cistern was added in 1906. Inside the eight-sided roof a wooden frame works like an umbrella: a single eight-sided post rises to the peak, with braces fanning out to the rafters, and the roofs are laid with black glazed tiles. The flat roof of the inner gallery serves as a terrace that runs all the way round at the level of the top storey.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Groot Kwartier: First Windmills, Colonial Cannons, and Citrus

Groot Kwartier, also historically called Rustenburg, was founded in 1694 and sits among the oldest continuously-recognised plantations on Curaçao. The house you see today, with its columned front supported by ten pillars and its mix of saddle and hipped roofs, has been extended and modified for over three centuries. Originally U-shaped and single-storey with the entrance on the west side, it was later raised a floor, had its patio built over, and the main entrance moved to the east. Over the years the house has worn ochre-yellow, red, and grey coats: each repaint a small archaeological layer. The plantation's reach was exceptional for its time. Maize grew in its fields; an orangerie sheltered citrus trees; banana groves and dividivi cultivation ran the slopes; salt was extracted; and a large herd of livestock grazed the hills. Groot Kwartier supplied its neighbourhood with water and, notably, supplied the Blue Curaçao distillers on Chobolobo with citrus peels for their liqueur. It was also the first plantation on Curaçao to install windmills, both at the wells and for grinding maize into meal. In the garden, cannons stand from 17 February 1804: the day Curaçao's own citizens, marines, and gunners repelled a British invasion, and a decisive factor in the English leaving the island two weeks later. A full renovation in 2011 restored the house comprehensively, including the single preserved grave in the garden (others had to be moved when the access road was built). The cannons are still in the garden, pointed, improbably, at nothing now but the trees. Before it was built over, the patio was an open courtyard lined with columns; that first U-shaped house probably dates from around 1700, like Groot Santa Martha with its similar plan, while most of the later work is nineteenth century. The Groot Kwartierweg runs up to the house from the east, in line with its central axis, and the outbuilding beside it includes a cistern. The monument listing singles out the columns inside and out and the mouldings, shaped decorative bands, on the walls and around doors and windows; at the corners of the main roof stand pirons, small pointed ornaments.

Landhuis Groot Piscadera: 308 Hectares, Mixed Crops, Still Standing

Plantage Groot Piscadera was originally 308 hectares and belonged to the larger plantations on the island. The fields grew maize, beans, and sugarcane. Indigo was cultivated for its blue dye, dividivi for its tannin-yielding pods. Livestock (cattle, sheep, goats) ran the surrounding terrain. This was a full-spectrum plantation rather than a specialist in any one commodity, and the mix of activities suggests an owner who preferred diversification to ambition. The landhuis has a core with a saddle roof, three dormer windows on the front and two on the rear. Galleries under lean-to roofs run along both long sides of the house: the classic Curaçao 18th-/19th-century configuration. Nothing flashy, nothing unusual, but well-built and solidly preserved. Groot Piscadera sits in the western suburbs of Willemstad, near De Savaan and Klein Piscadera (which, despite the name, is smaller). The area has been developed extensively over the last half-century, and the original plantation footprint is fragmented across modern neighbourhoods. But the landhuis itself survives, a 300-hectare ambition from another era persisting into a 21st-century suburb.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Groot Santa Martha: Salt, Cattle, Community

Groot Santa Martha, also known historically as Groot Sint Marten, was likely founded between 1670 and 1690, making it one of the older continuously-recognised estates on Curaçao's western coast. The landhuis dates from the same era; the large portico that now closes the patio is twentieth-century, with an image of Saint Martha carved into its fronton. For most of its history Groot Santa Martha was a salt plantation, particularly after David Dovale laid out new salt pans in Santa Martha Bay in the first half of the nineteenth century. Gerard Henri van der Linde Schotborgh, co-owner from 1914, was a planter to his core and lived in the landhuis. Financial pressure forced the sale to Jan Ernst van der Dijs in 1933, who also took up residence. Under his stewardship Santa Martha became a productive cattle farm, supplying Willemstad with milk, cheese, butter, and slaughter beef; the orchards yielded fruit and sorghum was grown for household use. When costs outran income, the plantation was sold to the government in 1952. After a thorough restoration of the landhuis and mangasinas in the early 1970s, the estate became home to Tayer Sosial Santa Martha: a sheltered workshop for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Today the grounds produce leather goods (tanned on-site from goat skin), restored furniture, and other crafts; part of the landhuis functions as a small museum. It is one of Curaçao's most quietly moving reinventions of a colonial estate. Sugar cane was among its crops, and an inventory from 1797 lists a cane mill. The house, a single storey on a U-shaped plan, sits on a natural rise above its lower outbuildings, with terraces and steps on three sides; its steep roofs are closed off by funnel-shaped gables, end walls that narrow towards the top. To the southwest lies the hofi, the plantation's garden ground, with wells, water basins, dams, remains of pumps and two kinds of pos di pia, wells with steps down to the water, one for people and one for animals.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Groot Sint Joris: 130 Years in One Family, a View Over the Bay

Landhuis Groot Sint Joris, also called Chinchó, carries one of the most elegant facades among the larger Curaçao estates: a distinctive semi-circular gable topped with palmette ornamentation. Beneath it sits an 18th-century marble slab depicting King David playing the harp, inscribed SCHOON GESIGT ('beautiful view'). The slab was likely placed by one of the estate's former Jewish owners. Groot Sint Joris has been in the hands of the Perret Gentil family for over 130 years. Casper Perret Gentil bought the plantation in 1884; his son Federico, grandfather of the current resident, took over in 1921. Five years later Federico sold the estate to Shell, who wanted to extract groundwater for the oil refinery at Isla. The family stayed as tenants of Shell, and continued farming and cattle-raising on the leased land until 1962. The estate was rich in laraha orange trees: the bitter oranges whose peels were dried on the plaza in front of the landhuis and sold to the Blue Curaçao distillery at Chobolobo. When Shell withdrew in 1985 the house passed to the Eilandgebied Curaçao. Though the front facade still looks striking, years of deferred maintenance have made the landhuis uninhabitable; the family lives in one of the outbuildings. The view from the rear terrace, however, remains spectacular. Sint Jorisbaai stretches below, and on a clear day Bonaire is visible on the horizon. It is one of the best vantage points on the island, from a landhuis that has seen three and a half centuries of change. The house in its present form probably dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, though part of the core may be older, and it is built as three almost equal sections side by side, each under its own hipped roof, a roof that slopes down on all four sides. On the front, the two outer sections have a gently curved top edge with volutes, scroll-shaped ornaments, and the rear terrace you look out from has a half-round central section. Behind the house stands a cistern with an aqueduct, a channel for carrying water; a twentieth-century cow stable and a large well complete the grounds.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Grote Berg: The Big Mountain

Grote Berg (locally Seru Grandi, 'big mountain' in Papiamentu) is a two-storey landhuis with a hipped roof and one of the most architecturally distinctive facades on Curaçao. On every side of the building rises an unusually large triangular fronton, each carrying a dormer window. The consistency and scale of these frontons give Grote Berg a commanding presence: from any angle it looks intentional, imposing, symmetrical. The plantation worked primarily as a livestock operation. The landhuis's current use is uncertain. Its neighbours, Harmonie and Papaya, place it in the central western zone of the island. The combination of two-storey height and large frontons on every facade makes Grote Berg one of the more self-consciously designed landhuizen on the island. Most Curaçao plantation houses are pragmatic buildings first; Grote Berg is pragmatic second. The triangular frontons would have been visually striking from any approach road in an era before dense vegetation grew around the house. Even today, once you know what to look for, Grote Berg is unmistakable. The house stands on the hilltop itself, north of the road to Westpunt, and its front door is reached by a straight stone stair with low side walls, each ending at the foot in a square stone pillar. North of the house survives the base of a fornu di pan, a bread oven, and the grounds also hold outbuildings and a kunuku house, a simple country cottage, where a servant lived.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Habaai: Baroque Gables in the Old Jewish Quarter

From 1651 Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam and Brazil settled on Curaçao, and the West India Company granted them land north of the Schottegat. Plantations such as De Hoop, Bleinheim, Marchena and Welgelegen rose there, and well into the nineteenth century the district was known as the Jewish Quarter. Welgelegen took the name Habaai in the eighteenth century, most likely a corruption of Gabay Henriquez, the family that owned it from 1771 and ran it as a mixed farm of livestock and crops. The baroque house dates from the middle of that century, as its curved gables suggest: two storeys with galleries front and back beneath a large attic. Habaai was among the first landhuizen to find a second life. In 1864 Franciscan sisters from Roosendaal bought it as a boarding school for girls; when they opened a new school building under the old name Welgelegen in 1867, Habaai itself became an orphanage. Early in the twentieth century the house taught straw-hat weaving, a trade that by around 1910 occupied nearly a fifth of the island's population. A retreat centre followed in 1965, then decades of neglect in which the outbuildings collapsed but the house itself held on. In 2005 new owners restored the landhuis with architect Maup Lanjouw, and a year later Gallery Alma Blou moved in from Otrobanda. It now shows changing exhibitions of Curaçaoan and Caribbean art, with locally made work for sale and an atmospheric terrace at the back suited to small gatherings. At the front the ground floor opens in an arcade, a row of seven open arches, with six sash windows above, windows that slide up and down; at the back both floors have such open arcades. The wing on the east side was added after 1864, for the sisters' boarding school and orphanage. Each curved gable, the shaped top of the end wall, ends in a shallow arch crowned by a square knob, and the roof has three dormers, small windows set into the roof slope, on each side.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Hato: The Airport's Forgotten Origin

Most visitors passing through Curaçao International Airport have no idea that its grounds were once an 18th-century cattle plantation with a famous freshwater spring. Landhuis Hato sits just north of the runway today, a quiet reminder of what the site was before 1929. Until 1792 Hato was a cattle estate of the Dutch West India Company that also grew food for the enslaved population; it doubled as a private retreat for the Company's directors. In the 19th century it pivoted into hospitality: one of Curaçao's earliest. Newspaper ads from 1843 by Michael Römer invited 'invalids and other visitors' to enjoy the freshwater pools, the cool shade of the orchard, and the 'beautiful gentleman's house' for multi-day luxury stays at $1.50 per day, meals included. Two decades later Frederik Pierre was still advertising the 'crystalline brook' and the restorative value of the spring-fed baths. Hato's transformation came in 1929, when the government decided to lay out the island's future airport across the plantation's fields. Later, the singing greengrocer Rudy Plaate farmed vegetables here for years, selling them first near Bloemhof and later at Zuikertuintje. In 2014 enterprising tenants planted a small vineyard and opened a bed & breakfast in the landhuis, but Curaçao Airport Holding ended the contract in 2016. The landhuis still stands: one of the few places on the island where you can see a working 18th-century plantation complex and a 21st-century international airport in a single glance. The plantation covered some 1,400 hectares, a size few others on the island matched, and the water of its spring was used to irrigate the land and later for a pond. Around the house, which stands about 50 metres north of the airport road, you can still find wells, the remains of a cistern, parts of that irrigation system and a graveyard with seven graves. In front of what is now the front of the house lie remains of a pavement of IJssel bricks, small bricks made along the river IJssel in the Netherlands.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Hel: 'Paradise' Named Hell, Across From Purgatory

Landhuis Hel carries one of the most surreal names on Curaçao's landhuis map. The estate's alternative names: Paradijs (Paradise), Tevredenheid (Contentment), Onverwachts (Unexpected). Suggest a long-standing semantic game, as does the fact that directly opposite it once stood Plantage Vagevuur (Purgatory). Whether the cluster was deliberately theological or just the product of successive owners naming their estates with dark humour is unclear. Either way, Paradijs, Vagevuur, and Hel once sat in a row, a kind of 18th-century three-act afterlife in the Curaçao countryside. Late 18th-century landhuis, architecturally distinguished. The core carries a hipped roof with dormer windows on all sides, with lean-to-roofed galleries wrapping every elevation. The approach stairway to the terrace features beautiful volutes at its base: elegant architectural flourishes that lift Hel above the common plantation house aesthetic. Originally an 18th-century plantation called Backer, part of it split off as Lesch den Dorst (Quench the Thirst, continuing the semantic riff), while the main plantation took the name Hel. In 1778 the Dutch war frigate Alphen exploded in Willemstad harbour: reportedly because a sailor walked into the powder magazine with a lit cigar, one of the island's worst historical disasters. Over 200 on board died, plus 50 ashore. Debris from the blast reportedly reached all the way to Landhuis Hel: kilometres inland. The crater is now history, but the landhuis's role as a marker of how far the shockwave travelled has passed into local memory. Because the ground slopes, the house rests on a high base, with terraces running the full width of the front and the back. Under the rear terrace lies a vaulted cistern, a water store with an arched ceiling, and the kitchen keeps its fogon, the traditional cooking hearth; the monument listing names both. The two outbuildings probably date from the second half of the nineteenth century, when the house itself may also have been altered.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Hermanus: Salt, Revolt, and a Quiet Weekend House

Along the road to Willibrordus, an old boundary post bears the names of two neighbouring plantations, Hermanus and Meiberg, in vintage lettering, restored in 2018 by Rensly Simon and finished by Herman Verboom and François van der Hoeven. The two estates shared ownership for almost all their recorded history. One of the earliest owners was Hermanus Storck, which is how the landhuis got its name. Like Jan Kok to the north, Hermanus was a salt plantation. Its owners relied on a large enslaved workforce until emancipation in 1863. During the 1795 uprising, the revolt led by Tula at Kenepa, one of Tula's co-leaders, Louis Mercier, ordered the original house at Hermanus set on fire. The current two-storey building, with a hipped roof and an unbroken cornice line running around the structure, is characteristic of second-half-nineteenth-century Curaçao architecture. A wing set perpendicular to the main block, with more traditional galleries, is likely older. Shell came calling in 1928, interested in both Hermanus and Meiberg because of their seaside location: perfect for an oil product export facility. In the end only Meiberg changed hands; Hermanus remained private. The current owners use it as a weekend retreat. Where cattle, sheep, and goats once grazed in the surrounding kraals, geese and peacocks now walk. The quiet contrast between the landhuis's past as a salt-extraction operation worked by enslaved people and its present as a peaceful private getaway is one of the harder things to reconcile on Curaçao. The estate, also called Oud Sint Marie, covered about 250 hectares and owned several of the salt pans in the Salinja, the salt lagoon to its east. The front block is neoclassical, a style that borrows from Greek and Roman buildings, with pirons, small pointed ornaments, on its roof; the older wing probably dates from the first half of the nineteenth century and has galleries on three sides and a kitchen with a fogon, a traditional cooking hearth. The house stands on a plateau a few metres above the road, on a raised terrace with steps on three sides, and a covered cistern sits beside the front terrace.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Jan Kok: Flamingos, Salt, and Sunset

The plantation takes its name from a slurring of Dutch to Papiamentu: Adriaan Kock, a master mason and one of the island's earliest colonists, built the first house here around 1705. 'Adriaan' blurred to 'Arrian' and finally to 'Jan', so when the traveller M.D. Teenstra wrote about it in 1836, he called it 'Plantaadje Arrienkok'. The formal name was originally Zevenhuizen, probably because it was the seventh house established on the south-western coast, after Oud Sint Marie (now Hermanus), Nieuw Sint Marie (now Rif), Malpais, Sint Joris (later Siberie), San Sebastiaan, and Port Marie. Adriaan's original house was already a ruin by 1784, likely destroyed by fire; only the eighteenth-century mangasina and cellar survived. The plantation itself carried on as a salt operation, particularly after 1832 when demand for Curaçao salt peaked. By the mid-nineteenth century eleven hectares of salt pans stretched out below the landhuis. Today those same pans are the feeding ground for flamingos that fly in from Bonaire: a tourist attraction in their own right, and arguably Jan Kok's most photographed feature. The current landhuis sits on a high terrace overlooking the pans, with galleries on both flanks. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century by Carel Zacharias de Haseth on the foundations of Adriaan's ruined house. In 1948 the veterinarian Max Diemont bought the then-derelict property from the government and in the 1960s had it restored, with architect Serge Alexeenko in charge of the work. He turned it into a popular nightspot with a museum, wine cellar, and outdoor dance floor. Diemont also bought the salt pans themselves in 1965, insisting that pans and landhuis belonged together. Since 1999 Stichting Monumentenzorg has owned the whole estate. The late Curaçaoan artist Nena Sanchez kept her studio and gallery here for years, and today the landhuis operates as a restaurant with a terrace that looks out over the pink reflections of the salt pans at sunset. Krioyo home cooking is the menu; the flamingos walking the flats at dusk are the show. Around 1800 Jan Kok belonged to the owners of neighbouring Siberie, and salt was taken from the Salinja Sint Marie into the twentieth century. The front terrace holds the slave bell, with a cistern beneath the terrace floor; the house probably faced east at first, while its front now faces west. Around it you can still find two pos di pia, wells with steps down to the water, two other wells and the remains of corrals.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Jan Thiel: From Salt Pans to Resort District

The man who turned Jan Thiel into the resort and beach district it is today was Casper Arturo Perret Gentil: known locally as shon Tutu. In 1915 he bought the roughly 400-hectare estate, including its landhuis, from the heirs of David Vidal. He expanded the existing eighteenth-century salt pans and in 1924 founded the seaside resort Vista Alegre at Jan Thiel bay: a wooden hotel, bathhouse, and five rental cottages, with paid entry and weekend musical performances. One of Curaçao's earliest organised leisure venues. The plantation was originally called Damasco, but the salt pans and landhuis quickly took the name of the earliest known owner, Jan Thielen (early 18th century). His descendants sold in 1737 to Moses Penso, and the plantation changed hands many times before settling into productive salt production. In the eighteenth century some 40 enslaved people worked the salt harvest, cultivated sorghum, indigo, and vegetables, and tended a substantial herd. In 1816 the inventory still listed '15 bags of Cotton Beans'. The current landhuis likely dates to the mid-eighteenth century, building materials were already on-site in 1752. The Perret Gentil family moved in during 1929, modernising the house with a bathroom and other conveniences. In the 1970s shon Tutu began subdividing the estate for the Vista Royal development, then sold the remainder, including the landhuis, to the pension fund APNA. After passing through Monumentenzorg and a 1997 restoration by architect Norbert Broos (sponsored by lawyer Leo Spigt's lease agreement), the complex opened as a boutique hotel. Today it operates as Plantation Jan Thiel Lodge, a bed & breakfast with the original cattle stable, corrals, and milking area all preserved. The plantation ran along the south coast from Lagun Jan Thiel to Caracasbaai, ending at the point called Lijhoek, where a coastal battery, a position for guns guarding the shore, is said to have stood. The house sits on higher ground in the north of the estate, west of the main rooi, a dry streambed that runs with water after rain, and its core has an unusually steep hipped roof, sloping on all four sides, with three widely spaced dormers, small windows set into the roof, on each side. Around it stand two magasinas, or storehouses, a small dwelling and a water reservoir, and most of the outbuildings date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Janwe: A Quieter Entry in the Catalogue

Janwe, historically also Klein Zuurzak and Goed Begin, is a smaller landhuis in the eastern rural zone of Curaçao. The estate's specific founding date and early ownership are among the items still being worked out by ongoing research into Curaçao's 78 intact landhuizen. It stands on its foundations, waiting for its fuller archival story to be written. Like many quieter landhuizen, Janwe's survival has depended more on persistence than celebrity. Its neighbours in the landscape connect it to the eastern cluster of plantation estates that together shaped the agricultural and livestock economy of that side of the island. If later archaeological or archive work emerges, this entry will grow; for now it is part of the complete list of 78 and that in itself is the story worth telling. Janwe mattered as a water plantation, an estate valued for its water, and in the nineteenth century it also served as a country retreat; it lies north of the Caracasbaaiweg near Dominguito, its land now reduced to a strip around the house. The present house probably dates from the middle of that century, though the core and galleries may be older, and its roof sits between funnel-shaped gables, end walls that narrow to a small top above two shoulders, with two dormers, small windows set into the roof, facing north and three facing south. A coach house, a cistern and a well complete the group, and the chimney of the former fogon, the kitchen's cooking hearth, still rises through the roof.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Klein Santa Martha: Salt, Revolt, Boutique Hotel

Aron Levi Maduro, one of the first Sephardic Jewish settlers on Curaçao, owned Klein Santa Martha in 1698. Sugarcane grew on the grounds then, alongside dividivi trees whose pods yielded tannin for leather. The plantation prospered. By 1819, under Matthias Schotborgh, it ran on the labour of 99 enslaved people: some tending sheep, cattle, donkeys, or poultry; others sent to work in the city as cook's apprentices or saleswomen. Together with Groot Santa Martha and San Nicolas, Klein Santa Martha drew its wealth from the salt pans of Santa Martha Bay. The plantation made uglier headlines during the 1795 slave revolt. The Dutch tutor Sabel, the only white person at Klein Santa Martha when the uprising reached the estate, was seized by the rebels. Under the leadership of Pedro Wacao, they tied him behind a horse and dragged him to Fontein, where he was killed. The incident is one of many that make the history of these estates difficult to tell without flinching. The government took over Klein Santa Martha in 1937. Dutch farmer Wietse de Vries moved into the landhuis to help promote modern agriculture and cattle-raising: part of former governor Oscar Helfrich's rural development plan. Farmers could settle in a purpose-built village, Helfrichdorp, to learn the trade. The project ultimately failed. By 1954 the landhuis was proposed for sale. It weathered decades of decline, brief stretches as a holiday camp, a family's occupation, then squatters. By the time the government transferred it to Monumentenzorg in 1995 it was a skeleton. Finally in 2012 a full restoration began. Two years later Klein Santa Martha reopened as a boutique hotel, with the restoration led by architects Anko van der Woude and Cas Aalbers: returning the landhuis, at last, to habitable life. The house stands on a small hilltop north of the bay, on a raised terrace it shares with a detached kitchen and two other structures, and a cistern lies under the terrace floor. It probably dates from the eighteenth century and was altered in the early nineteenth century, around 1900 and again in the 1930s, when among other things the window and door openings were changed. Look for the round air vent with a plaster star in each gable, the shaped top of the end wall, and for the toothed quoins on the corners of the front, plaster corner blocks set in alternating lengths.

Landhuis Klein Sint Joris: Hanging Balcony, Pyramid Tower

Known locally as Chenchó Chiki, Klein Sint Joris is one of the oldest plantations on Curaçao, with land first brought into cultivation in 1635 and the full plantation established in the mid-17th century. Livestock, small-scale agriculture, and, unusually, sugarcane all grew here. Sugar cultivation was rare on Curaçao; the dry climate did not favour it, but some estates persisted into the 19th century. Klein Sint Joris was one of them. The landhuis dates from the late 18th century and has several distinctive features. The saddle roof carries four dormer windows on one side and two on the other: an asymmetrical arrangement that's rare on the island. It is one of the very few Curaçao landhuizen with a hanging balcony: a small architectural luxury. A few metres from the main house stands a square tower with a pyramid roof whose original function remains unclear; similar towers on larger estates served as dovecotes or lookout posts, but its exact role here is undocumented. The house has been modified visibly over the years: different additions and interventions have left a legible archaeological layering. The surrounding landscape is still agricultural in character, with traces of the original plantation footprint visible in the placement of outbuildings and boundary walls. It is a quieter entry in the landhuizen catalogue, but the combination of early foundation date (1635), hanging balcony, and mysterious pyramid tower makes Klein Sint Joris architecturally more curious than its low profile suggests.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Klein Sint Michiel: Saint Michael and the Dragon

Above the main entrance of Landhuis Klein Sint Michiel, carved or mounted as an image, the archangel Michael battles a dragon. This is the kind of explicit iconographic statement you rarely find on a Curaçao landhuis: most restrict themselves to a single family crest or an inscribed date. The image makes the house's namesake instantly clear. Klein Sint Michiel was a 185-hectare salt plantation, part of the south-coast cluster that worked the salt pans of Sint Michiel Bay. The plantation's economic core was salt production, supplemented in the 20th century by cattle raising. Where Groot Sint Michiel across the peninsula was larger in landholding (the 'groot' refers to the extent of land, not the building), the landhuis here at Klein Sint Michiel is actually the larger and more architecturally assertive of the two. The current building was rebuilt in 1862 on earlier foundations. It consists of two adjoining blocks, one longer than the other, each with its own saddle roof and dormer windows. A gallery runs along the south side, catching the coastal breeze. The alternative historical names Jan Doret and Jan Dorst attach a long-forgotten owner's identity to the place. Klein Sint Michiel sits today in the landscape it has always occupied, its salt pans long quiet, the fight between Michael and the dragon still being waged above the front door. The plantation goes back to the seventeenth century; its first known owner was Levy Maduro, also the first Maduro on record on the island, and neighbouring Slangenbaai had long belonged to the same owners. Close to the house, in fertile and well-watered ground, lies a hofi, a garden where crops and fruit were grown, possibly the one Johan van Walbeeck mentioned in his 1634 description of this area. The date 1862 appears in the east gables, the tops of the east end walls, and around the house survive a sekrèt or outdoor toilet, a kas di palomba or dovecote, a kas di bomba or pump house, wells, some with a mill, dams and remains of walls in the salinja, the salt lagoon.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Kenepa (Knip): Where the Revolt Began

Among all of Curaçao's plantation houses, Landhuis Kenepa, locally Knip, carries the heaviest history. Here, on 17 August 1795, an enslaved man named Tula led the largest slave uprising in the Dutch Caribbean, a six-week revolt that shook the colonial order to its core and is now commemorated annually as Curaçao's Day of the Struggle for Freedom. The plantation itself is far older. Records of its sale date to 1693, with rights to graze an unlimited herd of cattle across its hills: a use that would define it for three centuries. The current landhuis bears 1830 in its gable, suggesting the main building dates from that year or was extensively rebuilt then. By the early twentieth century Knip was still home to hundreds of goats grazing the now-empty corrals. A 1832 probate inventory reveals the other side of plantation life: the house of owner Jannetje van der Meulen was fitted with mahogany furniture, paintings, curios, and mirrors, while the plantation ran on the labour of 128 enslaved Africans and one person of mixed heritage. The grounds still hold traces of this past: eighteenth-century indigo vats (discovered in 2014 by the Werkgroep Archeologie), an old inloopput (walk-in well), and consolidated boundary stones restored in 2018 with support of the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Caribisch Gebied. The Muskus family brought life back to the house in the early twentieth century, using it as a weekend retreat and restoring it in 1939. Since 1998 the landhuis has housed the Museo Tula, with permanent exhibitions on slavery, Tula's revolt, and Afro-Curaçaoan heritage. On the first floor, a long list details the punishments, from lashings to days of confinement, that enslaved people could expect for specific infractions. It is heavy material, but essential for understanding the island's story. The monument register explains the 1830 in the gable: in that year the original 18th-century house was rebuilt, which gave its exterior a 19th-century character. The tops of the funnel gables, end walls that narrow toward the top like a funnel, show three years, 1830, 1939 and 1985, and the roof has four dormers, small upright windows set into the roof, on each side. Inside, the floors of the core and the galleries are laid in yellow brick; around the house stand stables, sheds, magasinas (storehouses) and corrals, and a village of 175 huts, the kas di pali maishi, once stood beside the house.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Koningsplein: 1650 in an Inside Wall

Plantage Koningsplein likely dates back to the 17th century. During work on the original landhuis, the year 1650 is said to have emerged on an inside wall, a single inscription that would push the estate's known history back by decades. The monument register, however, places the present house in the middle of the 19th century. The plantation was small (35 hectares) and the landhuis was used primarily as a country retreat rather than an agricultural operation. The building itself is architecturally unusual. It consists of three blocks attached along their long sides, with the middle block rising slightly higher than the flanking outer blocks. All three have saddle roofs. The middle block is probably the oldest, betrayed by its dormer windows, which look outward over the roofs of the outer blocks, an uncommon and slightly awkward arrangement that reveals the building's layered construction history. The outer blocks have additional cornice mouldings on their short sides. The property sits in the central-south area of the island, with nearby landhuizen Meerwijk and Pos Cabai. Its current use is uncertain, but the building survives: 1650 in an inside wall, still there for anyone who knows where to look. The plantation lies east of the Schottegat, close to the oldest Dutch landing place on the island, and the house stands on a hill, on the highest point of the grounds. Its south front is laid out symmetrically, with doors in the middle and at both ends, windows in between, and heavy fluted pilasters, flat wall columns with vertical grooves, on the corners. A terrace runs along the front, and under the terrace on the east side lies a large cistern for rainwater.

Landhuis Koraal Tabak: Tobacco, Drag Races, a Gated Future

Around 1700 Koraal Tabak, 'coral tobacco', was one of the major West India Company plantations on Curaçao. As the name suggests, tobacco was grown here. In 1636 the WIC director reported to the Heren XIX in Amsterdam that the 'toeback saet in onse tuijn van Chinchorro' (tobacco seed in our garden at Chinchorro) produced disappointingly little. He probably meant Sint Joris, which lies just east of Koraal Tabak. The 19th-century landhuis consists of two blocks with a spacious hall in the front section. A kitchen and other additions sit behind. The house stands on a small rise, giving it a fine view. Two large mangasinas and cattle corrals once stood beside it; these have unfortunately been bulldozed. Mid-20th century the Bakhuis family bought the plantation. In 1963 Hugo Bakhuis opened Wonderful Beach on the Sint Joris Bay side: a recreation centre with weekend cottages, horse trails, football and volleyball pitches. The landhuis housed a restaurant. Bakhuis, nicknamed Mr Wonderful, even ran a special bus line from Punda to the beach. The operation closed after two years. But the plantation's north-coast plain continued hosting drag races (short car races) for decades. Until recently, diabaas, a volcanic stone, was quarried on the grounds, and rubbish was dumped there too. Koraal Tabak has recently been sold to investors interested in restoring the landhuis. What comes next is anyone's guess, but the site has more lives in it yet.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Morgenster: Political Party HQ to Artist's Atelier

Landhuis Morgenster, 'Morning Star', is a former plantation house that served as a buitenverblijf, a country retreat. A saddle roof with two dormer windows on each side crowns the house, and the front facade is symmetrical, with a central double door and two windows to either side. For a long stretch of the 20th century Morgenster served as the headquarters of a political party: one of the unusual uses to which Curaçao's smaller landhuizen have been put as the plantation economy faded. Political offices, teachers' unions, children's homes, retirement homes, restaurants, art galleries, boutique hotels: the shift from agriculture to service and cultural use is not about losing the landhuizen but about finding them new roles, and Morgenster is part of that story. The estate was fully restored a few years ago and now houses the gallery and atelier of the current owner-artist. Research into its deeper history (the foundational owners, exact construction date, and early uses) is still ongoing. What is certain is that the house has survived into a happy current iteration: a morning-star of a building, painted white and open for the making and showing of art, on a small hill between the road to Westpunt and the Schottegatweg West. The monument register places the house in the 19th century and records that it was used as a country house during the second half of that century; an earlier restoration took place in 1984. It is a fairly small house on a raised platform, with terraces on three sides and steps at the front and side, and its end walls are gables with shoulders, short horizontal ledges at the foot of the gable point. Part of the rear roof was raised to make room for a staircase, and an aqueduct on a low arch adjoins the western corner.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Mount Pleasant (Malpais): Sisal Gamble, Baroque Gables

The estate has gone by two names for two centuries. Originally Malpais, 'bad land', a name that hardly inspires investment confidence. In 1810, twelve years after buying the plantation, owner Gerard Duyckink officially renamed it Mount Pleasant. The rebrand was understandable; the name stuck for a long time, though locals have drifted back to calling it Malpais today. Salt harvesting and livestock were Malpais's mainstays for most of its history. That changed in the early 20th century when 200 hectares were planted with sisal. By 1918 the Eerste Sisal Cultuur Maatschappij had a quarter of Malpais under sisal and had acquired a defibering machine. The Sisal Company was led by Gijsbert d'Aumale, Baron van Hardenbroek, who lived in neighbouring landhuis Papaya. Despite the initial enthusiasm, the enterprise went bankrupt in 1922. Shell bought the plantation in 1924. In 1943 Stichting Birgen di Rosario wanted, with Shell's blessing, to open an old-age home at Malpais, but the renovation costs were prohibitive; they settled on Santa Catharina instead, moving to Huize Welgelegen less than a year later. In the 1960s Dutch farmers ran the landhuis; Keijzer milk advertised fresh milk, butter, cheese, and yoghurt from Malpais. The 18th-century landhuis itself is architecturally remarkable: baroque side gables and five baroque dormer windows on the front facade. It was declared a protected monument two years ago. In 1984 Shell handed it to the island government for a symbolic sum; the foundation Yubia Bendita ran a children's home here, and today the church community Crusaders Curaçao uses the house. A church building stands on the grounds. The mix of industrial gamble, livestock, religious use, and protected architectural gem is pure Curaçao. The house stands high on a hill with the Sint Michiel salt pond to its south; in good years the pans there yielded more than 10,000 barrels of salt, and the estate once covered 930 hectares. Between 1748 and 1874 the plantation changed hands fifteen times. Besides the five baroque dormers on the south side, the roof carries three more on the north, and next to the house, at its southwest corner, stand a cistern and its aqueduct.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Oost Jongbloed: Rebuild After the Fire

The original plantage Jongbloed, 90 hectares, was bought in 1727 by skipper Jan Jongbloed, who renamed the estate Boventuin to Jongbloed. In 1803 the plantation was plundered; the landhuis was burned down in the raid. For decades the plantation operated without a main residence. Eventually, well into the 19th century, a new landhuis was built on a different part of the estate, becoming known as Oost Jongbloed (East Jongbloed) because of its location. The original Jongbloed landhuis site is occupied today by a different building; some books and websites confusingly depict Oost Jongbloed as if it were the original Jongbloed. In this catalogue Oost Jongbloed is listed as a separate landhuis because that is historically accurate: it is not a restoration of Jongbloed, it is a successor structure on the same plantation. The late-19th-century Oost Jongbloed is small: just a core with a saddle roof. Around 1920 a short transverse wing with a hipped roof was added to the north. It is a modest, functional building. Together with its predecessor (the lost Jongbloed) and the surviving mangasina of the original estate (reportedly converted to a crèche and dwelling), Oost Jongbloed represents the full arc: founded in 1727, burned in 1803, rebuilt, repurposed, and still standing today. The monument register names the builders: Cornelis Sprockel built the older part, a modest stone house with a kitchen, and his son Wiles Olivier Sprockel added the cross wing. A corridor under a sloping roof links the two parts, and the 1920 wing has kept its original interior in good condition. The house stands on the east side of the former plantation, west of the former garden Liverpool and of today's Hofje Pachi Sprockel.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Pannekoek: 175 Hectares and a Family Name

Pannekoek (yes, pancake in Dutch) is named after Gerrit Pannekoek, the first owner of this 175-hectare plantation, which was originally regarded as a 'tuin', a garden, of the larger Groot Santa Martha estate. The name is mundane; the plantation was not. At various times it ran tillage, livestock, and served as the residence of the fifth district's district master (Jan Jacob van Dam, from 1863): when the roof tiles from neighbouring Dokterstuin were stripped and relocated here in 1864 to keep Pannekoek functional. The landhuis, probably from the early 19th century, has a compact core with a saddle roof, wrapped on all four sides by a lean-to gallery. There are no dormer windows: a clean, relatively unadorned silhouette. The estate has been in government hands since 1913. Various public functions have rotated through over the last century, and the building remains standing in rural central Curaçao. The plantation's nearest neighbours are Groot Santa Martha and San Juan, both larger and more storied, but Pannekoek anchors its section of the inland countryside the way a reliable mid-sized landhuis does: not the attraction you drive to, but the one you pass on the way. The house sits at the foot of a hill near the road toward Soto. Its south front has a central double door with three windows on each side, and in the southwest corner is the kitchen with its fogon, an open cooking hearth, while a chimney rises from the gallery roof on that side. A masonry gutter along the gallery roofs feeds an aqueduct to the cistern, and a well and dams complete the estate's water works.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Papaya: Small Plantation, One Surviving Tree

Papaya was a small plantation in the central west of Curaçao, a subdivision of the larger Malpais estate. It raised cattle and sheep, cultivated the fruit that gave it its name, and was known earlier as 'Wel te Vrede' ('Well Satisfied'). The 19th-century landhuis is modest: three small adjoining blocks, each with a hipped roof, and a single understated dormer window on the front. This was once the home of Gijsbert d'Aumale, Baron van Hardenbroek, director of the ambitious sisal-growing Eerste Sisal Cultuur Maatschappij that tried to plant 200 hectares of sisal across neighbouring Malpais before going bankrupt in 1922 (see: Mount Pleasant / Malpais). The baron lived at Papaya while his company gambled on sisal next door. One papaya tree still stands next to the landhuis: the last of the working orchard, a tree-sized archaeological trace. The house most recently served as a rehabilitation centre. Its current use is uncertain. Papaya is small, quiet, and a reminder that not every landhuis was grand: some were working kitchen-gardens with a modest house to match. The monument register dates the house to the second half of the 19th century and notes that its layout and details are all of a piece and that it was probably built in one go. It stands on a raised base on the lowest part of the land, close to the road to Westpunt, while most of the plantation is taken up by the hill Seroe Papaja. Look for the fluted pilasters, flat wall columns with vertical grooves, on the front corners, the terraces with stairs at front and back, and the plastered rosette in the triangular top of the dormer.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Parera: Salt Plantation Turned Guarded Retreat

Landhuis Parera derives its name from the widow E. Parera, the first owner on record. The estate operated first as a salt plantation, extracting salt from nearby pans, and by the mid-19th century had shifted to a modest livestock holding dominated by goats. Later still it transitioned into a buitenverblijf, a country retreat, as the plantation economy wound down and Willemstad merchants looked for cooler air away from the city. The landhuis largely dates from the first half of the 19th century. The form is unusual for Curaçao: a long two-storey core with saddle roof, galleries running along both long sides of the lower floor, and a balustraded terrace wrapping a colonnaded open space. The house has been recently refurbished, giving it a more finished appearance than the 1978 and 2011 archival photographs would suggest. Access is controlled through a guarded entrance gate, a modern security reality that limits casual visits. The landhuis sits near Arrarat to the south and Hel to the west, unusual neighbours that frame it within one of Curaçao's more concentrated clusters of historical country houses, just inside the south-coast suburbs of Willemstad. Before it took the Parera name the estate was called Berg Carmel; the widow Parera sold it to Claas Schotborgh in 1745. The house stands on the highest point of a headland on the Schottegat, and its end walls are funnel gables, gables that narrow toward the top like a funnel. The neoclassical details, a cornice (the moulded band below the roof edge) with drapery ornament and dentils (a row of small tooth-like blocks), date from the second half of the 19th century, when the estate served as a country house; the original outbuildings have not survived.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Pos Cabai: Horse Well, 8 Hectares, U-Shaped

Pos Cabai translates as 'horse well': the estate was named for the important water well on its grounds. Plantations on Curaçao often took their names from their most important feature, whether a tree (Papaya), a fruit (Kenepa), or a water source (Pos Cabai, Brakkeput). Water was precious, wells were infrastructure, and a well named for horses tells you something about how stock was valued. The plantation was small, just 8 hectares, and was soon used as a country retreat rather than a working agricultural operation. The landhuis dates from the second half of the 19th century. It has a core with a saddle roof and three dormer windows on each side, every one of them topped with a triangular fronton: an unusually consistent decorative detail. Lean-to-roofed galleries run along both long sides of the core. The house is U-shaped, with two small side wings. A decorated cornice with drapery ornamentation runs above the main body, an elegant Victorian touch. Pos Cabai sits near Bever and Meerwijk. The estate is also known by the alternative name Zuikertuin, which is confusing given that the nearby shopping district bears the same name after a different, entirely separate landhuis (Suikertuintje). Welcome to Curaçao toponymy. The first owner on record, Lopez Laguna, sold the plantation to Sara da Costa Gomez in 1745, and the name Pos Cabai first appears in a deed around the middle of the 19th century. The well that gave the estate its name was a public one, and the house stands high, on a plateau east of the Schottegat. Between the two side wings lies a patio, the western wing has a cistern in its basement, and the top of the old kitchen chimney carries a drapery motif with tassels at the corners.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Ronde Klip: Classical Grace, Hollywood Cameo

Landhuis Ronde Klip belongs without question to the most beautiful landhuizen on Curaçao. The main building is built in classicist style with a hipped roof over two storeys, flanked by separate wings to the north, east, and west: each with its own hipped roof. The eastern wing dates from later than the main house; the northern wing is the most recent addition, built in 2002 and partly standing on columns. Only the eastern wing has dormer windows. An elegant open-arched gallery runs along the lower storey of the main building and continues into the western side of the east wing. The pillared south facade, added later, is supported by six columns. The plantation of Ronde Klip was enormous: 825 hectares. Cattle ranged across the land; cotton was grown; aloe was cultivated. For several years in the mid-20th century the landhuis served as a reform school for girls, under the direction of the Zusters van Bethanie in de Antillen. A sharp departure from the sisters' oversight came in 1979, when parts of the feature film 'Firepower', starring Sophia Loren and James Coburn, were shot at the landhuis. It is Curaçao's most unexpected Hollywood cameo. The estate has been fully restored and modernised in recent years while preserving its most important historical details. The classical composition still reads clearly: symmetry, proportion, columns. Ronde Klip is one of the estates where the architectural ambition of 19th-century Curaçao plantation owners is still fully legible, not buried under later accretion. The monument register dates the main building, together with the western wing, to around 1860. The gallery on the ground floor is formed by fourteen shallow arches, and the columned porch is crowned by a pediment, a low triangular gable. The western wing holds the old kitchen with its oven and chimney, and the grounds still keep a cistern, a toilet house, a magasina (storehouse) and corrals.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Rooi Catootje: Where a 19th-Century Library Met the 21st

Rooi Catootje is the rare landhuis where two centuries share the same garden without visibly contradicting each other. The 19th-century house stands furnished with antique pieces that feel like they have always been there. Next to it, since 2010, rises a glass-walled hyper-modern library built by the last owner, Ena Dankmeijer-Maduro (1920-2016), to house her father's remarkable collection of Judaica and Antilliana. Together they form exactly the unity the then-ninety-year-old Ena had envisioned. The plantation's name comes from a rooi, a seasonal drainage gully, running along its eastern border, and from a small female owner named Catootje whose name somehow attached to the place. The plantation already existed in 1700. Goats and sheep grazed the common pastures; chickens and other poultry ran the orchard; coconut, papaya, tamarind, and lime grew in the garden plots. The library that now sits beside the landhuis is one of Curaçao's most important scholarly resources, the Mongui Maduro Library, holding over 30,000 books, manuscripts, and documents covering the Jewish diaspora in the Americas, the history of the Dutch Antilles, and Caribbean culture more broadly. Researchers come from across the region to work in its quiet reading rooms. Walk from the 19th-century landhuis, with its heavy mahogany furniture and portraits, into the glass library, and you feel two centuries shaking hands without needing to speak. The monument register dates the house to about 1853, the year the Maduro family acquired the plantation, which until the mid-19th century was known as Rust en Vree, also spelled Rust en Vrede (a different estate from Landhuis Rust en Vrede on the Santa Rosaweg); the rooi in the name is probably the gully now called Rooi Magdalena. A two-storey core under a hipped roof, a roof that slopes down on all four sides, is wrapped by single-storey galleries, and a bent aqueduct on a column and an arch carries rainwater from the northwest corner to a large cistern. Look also for the iron bell on the northwest corner of the terraces and for the hofi, the plantation garden, with its wells and dams.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Rust en Vrede: A Doctor's House in Slow Decline

For most of the 20th century Rust en Vrede, 'Rest and Peace', served as the official residence of the district master of the surrounding area. In the 1930s it housed shon Piet van Leeuwen, father of the writer Boelie van Leeuwen. His successor was Herman Schotborgh. The house itself dates from the second half of the 19th century and was originally known as De Vergenoeging. Later the government stationed its doctors at Rust en Vrede. Dr Gorsira first, then Dr Rauchbaar who lived there with his family until 1990. Rauchbaar ran his private practice from the house, with the government practice just across from the Santa Rosa church. Deep gardens stretched in front of and behind the landhuis; he fenced them with a cactus hedge, and two staircases led down to the rear garden: faint traces that still exist today, though overgrown. After Rauchbaar's departure there was real interest from several parties in taking over the landhuis. The government did nothing. Windows and doors were bricked up, a common defense against squatters that also guarantees decline. In 2002 Rust en Vrede was officially declared a protected monument, but protection without maintenance is a slow eulogy. Today it stands as a shadow of the country house it was: the front facade still legible as 19th-century colonial, the gardens still guessable in outline, but visibly fading year on year. It is a reminder that without active care even solid landhuizen drift toward ruin. The 17 recognised ruins on Curaçao are not an exhaustive list; there is a long waiting room. For many years in the 20th century the house also served the Central Administration Office as a branch for the second district. It has a core under a hipped roof, a roof that slopes down on all four sides, with galleries running around it, and inside the core the ceiling is unusually high. Against the north side stands a cistern that was enlarged in the 20th century, and there is a small terrace at the front and a terrace along nearly the full width of the back, where the central door has a round-arched top.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis San Juan: Once the Most Important Plantation on Curaçao

San Juan, originally Sint Jan, was founded in the middle of the 17th century and grew, at 657 hectares, into what was considered in the early 19th century the most important plantation on Curaçao. Corn, sugar cane, cotton, and indigo grew in its fields; livestock ranged its slopes; even modest salt extraction was added in the first half of the 19th century. In the 20th century, an unusually specific late chapter, an iguana farm operated on the grounds. The 18th-century landhuis has a core with a hipped roof and three dormer windows on one side, with lean-to galleries running along all four elevations. The distinctive feature is architectural and practical: a long, alternately arched and straight-bowed aqueduct connects the house to its rainwater reservoir, ensuring that every drop of runoff from the roof reaches storage. Forty centimetres higher than groundwater, stone-built, and visually striking against the landscape, it is one of the more elegant pieces of plantation water engineering on the island. Plantage San Juan sits in the rural west, its neighbours Cas Abou and Pannekoek. The house and its aqueduct still stand, and the scale of its former importance is legible in every direction: 657 hectares is a very large number. San Juan also has a place in the island's wider history: on 20 August 1634 the Spanish, who had held Curaçao since 1499, surrendered to the Dutch here. Matthias Schotborgh bought the plantation from Jasper Ellis de Veer in 1806, and the monument register describes the Schotborgh family as still living in the house. The rear terrace holds salt grinders and a fornu di pan, a bread oven, and the complex also includes a group of magasinas (storehouses), corrals and a grave.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis San Nicolas: 339 Hectares of Salt

By the end of the 17th century the plantation of San Nicolas already existed, eventually covering 339 hectares. The trinity of 18th- and 19th-century Curaçao economy (tillage, livestock, and above all salt extraction) all three played out here. San Nicolas was part of the west-coast salt cluster that, together with Groot Santa Martha and Klein Santa Martha, drew its wealth from the salt pans of Santa Martha Bay. The landhuis itself dates from the 18th century. The core has a hipped roof with dormer windows, and long lean-to galleries run along its two long sides. Several outbuildings cluster around the main house: the remnants of the operational infrastructure that supported a 300+ hectare agricultural and salt-extracting enterprise. Like neighbouring Klein Santa Martha, San Nicolas relied for two centuries on the labour of enslaved people; unlike its better-restored neighbour it has not yet found a second life as a museum, boutique hotel, or cultural centre. San Nicolas sits today in an area that remains rural in character, still near the salt pans that built its economy, still within a landscape where the geography of 17th-century Curaçao plantation zoning can be traced almost unchanged. It is the kind of landhuis that rewards the visitor who comes for the larger story: one salt plantation among a cluster, one outbuilding complex among many that served the salt industry, one mid-sized 18th-century house that survived into the 21st. The monument register dates the oldest parts of the house to around the middle of the 18th century and some outbuildings to the 19th, and notes that besides livestock and salt the plantation grew trade crops such as indigo, dividivi pods and dyewood. The short ends close in truncated gables, end walls whose point is cut off, and the roof carries three dormers, small upright windows set into the roof, on each side. Around the house are terraces with steps on all four sides, three cisterns, a kitchen and a small bathhouse that still has its cement tub.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis San Sebastian: Dated 1754, Extended in the 19th Century

San Sebastian, also Sint Sebastiaan or Sint Bastiaan, was founded early in the 18th century. Maize grew in its fields at first; later, cochineal was cultivated (for carmine dye), and at the end of the 19th century aloe plantings were added: a quiet succession of agricultural experiments, each trying to match a different export market. The landhuis itself carries the date 1754 on its gable. It did not survive the 19th century unchanged. During a British raid in 1805 the estate, like other plantations nearby, was very probably plundered. The current structure shows its complex architectural history. The original core has a saddle roof and a single dormer window, with lean-to galleries running the length of both long sides. Added later: a two-storey wing attached to the south gallery (with its own saddle roof) and two short wings flanking the east-facing short side of the core, connected by a gate over the patio. It reads like three buildings sharing a footprint. The plantation's neighbours, Buitenbosch and Jan Kock, place it in the north-western rural zone. It is privately owned today, still standing quietly where it was built and later extended. On the front gable the date appears as Aº 1754, in a rectangular moulded frame under a small pediment, a low triangular crown. The monument register names Abraham Ulloa as the first known owner, who sold the estate to Herman Winkler in 1722, and places the house on a hill north of the road from Sint Willibrordus to Soto. The complex also includes a kitchen with a fogon, an open cooking hearth, a terrace with a threshing or drying floor, a cistern, a shed and a corral.

Landhuis Santa Barbara: The Grandest House on the Island

When the traveller M.D. Teenstra passed through Curaçao around 1832 he called Santa Barbara 'the largest and most magnificent house in all of Curaçao'. It has not lost the title since. The estate rises majestically out of the green, with a stately high staircase leading up to the living quarters. From the high terrace above the mangasinas the view opens across the Spaanse Water and to the Tafelberg beyond. The oldest part of the current building, dating from around 1800, sits in the north wing. Possibly this is a remnant of the fortified house built in the 16th century by Lazaro Bejarano, the Spanish governor of Curaçao. Matthias Beck, vice-director of the Dutch West India Company between 1657 and 1668, founded the plantation. In that era it produced sugarcane, tobacco, and, to judge from the indigo vats recovered on the grounds, indigo. It later became a mixed operation with sorghum, beans, peanuts, and other vegetables, alongside herds of sheep, goats, cattle, donkeys, and a few horses. In the mid-19th century nopal cactus was planted to farm cochineal, the source of carmine red dye. Santa Barbara's guest list is remarkable. In 1874 phosphate was discovered on the estate's Tafelberg, launching a decades-long mining operation that shaped Curaçao's economy. Pastor Niewindt said fortnightly mass here under owner George Curiel (1815-1833). Prince Willem Frederik Hendrik spent the night here in 1835. Governor René Römer lived on Santa Barbara for almost three years (1983-1990) while the governor's residence in Fort Amsterdam was being restored. At the end of the 20th century the plantation grounds were sold to a developer; today the famous Barbara Beach is a private beach for hotel guests, and the landhuis, still standing in its green surround, is gradually becoming an island within villa developments and golf courses.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Santa Cruz: Rum, Quarantine, and Reclaimed Beach

Santa Cruz is a small landhuis with a surprisingly industrial past. It was one of the few Curaçao plantations where sugarcane cultivation persisted well into the 19th century; the stump of the sugar mill still stands across the road from the landhuis: the only surviving example on the island. From the cane, rum was distilled for local consumption. During the 1795 slave revolt, the enslaved people of Santa Cruz made ample use of the distilled stock. In the middle of the 19th century a distillery with two stills was still operating on the grounds. The landhuis itself dates mostly from the 18th century. Livestock ran the grounds; remains of pig sheds are still visible, along with three old wells. In 1866 owner Willem van Uytrecht ceded a piece of land for the construction of a quarantine building, because Santa Cruz Bay had become the quarantine anchorage for ships arriving from areas where contagious diseases were active: yellow fever, cholera. The bay served this purpose into the early 20th century. In the 20th century, shon Etie, August Georg Statius Muller, owned the plantation. His decision in 1941 to close the beach to the public caused a local storm, with access limited to members of the Sportvereniging Kwiek. From 1944 the landhuis was rented out and the beach reopened to the public. Since 1983 the house has been privately owned and inhabited. The beach today is again public and one of the quieter west-coast options: less crowded than Grote Knip or Cas Abou, with calm clear water and the same reef life. The house has one storey with a roomy attic and stands on a large terrace on a hill north of the southern road to Westpunt, with a kitchen block joined to it by a passage and a cistern against one corner. Its front gable (the end wall under the roof) curves in and out in the 18th-century style known as Curaçao baroque, though more soberly than at Habaai or Malpais, while the rear facade and the dormers (upright windows in the roof slope, each with a little roof of its own) point to the first half of the 19th century. Details to look for are the arched main door with its heavy mouldings, the star in the crown of each dormer, and the ruin of a mangasina, a plantation storehouse, close to the house.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Savonet: Four Centuries of Curaçao in One Estate

Few places on Curaçao compress as much of the island's history into a single piece of land as the Savonet estate. Around 1662 Matthias Beck, then vice-director of the West India Company, laid out the plantation. Before that, Arawak people had lived and farmed here for nearly four thousand years: a span now threaded through the museum that the landhuis became in 2010. The plantation's golden age arrived with Matthias van der Dijs, who took ownership in 1815 and grew Savonet into one of the largest operations on the island. He experimented with nopal cactus, cotton, and aloe, and in 1830 bought the neighbouring plantation Zorgvlied to expand his holdings. The scale of the enterprise shaped the landscape: hundreds of goats, sheep, and cattle grazed the fields, which grew dense with maishi chikí (sorghum) and other crops. During an English raid in 1806 the landhuis partly burned down; what stands today is a nineteenth-century rebuild, though the undulating gables and dormer windows faithfully echo the eighteenth-century style. Savonet is remarkable for how much of its supporting infrastructure still stands. Beyond the main house and its mangasina, visitors can still see the stables, a small dairy house, a five-seat privy, a dovecote, a smithy, a charcoal storage hut, an overseer's house, and the cattle corrals: all restored under Ingenieursbureau Techcon NV. The original wooden window latches, known locally as soldaatjes, were reproduced by hand. A cluster of old wells with stone drinking troughs, used to water both livestock and fields, remains visible within walking distance of the landhuis. Since 1978 the combined former plantations of Savonet, Zorgvlied, and Zevenbergen form the 2,000-hectare Christoffelpark, home to the endangered Curaçao deer (biná). The landhuis functions today as the park's museum, telling the story of the plantation, its natural setting, and the generations of Arawak, European, and African people who shaped it. The island's monument register notes that Savonet is one of the few plantations that kept working into the late 19th century, and that the addition of Zorgvlied in 1830 made it the largest plantation on the island, at more than 1,500 hectares. In 1863 Jacob Bennebroek van der Linde Schotborgh became the owner, and in 1965 the heirs of J.W.J. van der Linde Schotborgh and J.E. Debrot sold the estate to the Island Territory of Curaçao, which put the land and outbuildings in the care of Stinapa, later Carmabi. Beyond the buildings already named, the grounds hold a mill house, a threshing or drying floor, the remains of the village where enslaved people lived, and east of the house a hofi, a cultivated garden plot, with wells, water reservoirs, dams and canals.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Siberie: Named After Its Venezuelan Owner

Landhuis Siberie is one of the few plantations on Curaçao that was owned by a Venezuelan. Saverio Cafiero bought Siberie and Jan Kok in 1784. The estate was actually called Sint Joris at the time; it gradually became known by its owner's name, which the deeds already garbled into Serberio and Silberio and which stuck as Siberie. From 1830 to 1978 Siberie was owned by the Statius Muller family. August Leberegt Statius Muller, owner of the Curaçaosche Courant, lived on the plantation and in 1832 expanded the salt pans in Sint Mariebaai. He also experimented with cotton cultivation. Professor Went, who surveyed Curaçao's agriculture in 1901, was generous in his praise of Siberie's substantial herd, though he had reservations about the quality of its butter and cheese production. From 1906 to 1913 the district master lived in the 18th-century house. Earlier, in the 19th century, the steep original roof with its eight dormer windows was replaced with a hipped roof over the core, a change that gave the building an architectural awkwardness: the new roof has no dormers and doesn't quite connect to the lean-to galleries. The original kitchen still features its fornu (oven), built with ijsselsteentjes: small yellow Dutch bricks from IJsselstein, shipped as ballast. The current owner restored the landhuis in 2018 while preserving numerous authentic elements; the old donkey stable (with its original wooden door) and the large mangasina were converted into vacation apartments. You can stay here today: sleep in the converted mangasina where salt-plantation grain was once stored. The house is reached by an unpaved lane and stands on a raised terrace about 250 metres from the main road, with steps on all four sides and galleries wrapping around the core. Most tiles on the core roof bear the names L.A. Snoeck and C. van den Broeke, both of Utrecht, and finials, small upright ornaments, mark the ends of the ridge. The complex also includes corrals, a plantation manager's house, a European grave, indigo vats, parts of the old boundary wall and the remains of the village of the enslaved; above the central door of one of the mangasinas, the plantation storehouses, is the date 1753, which suggests that house and storehouses were built around the middle of the 18th century.

Landhuis Steenen Koraal: From Goat Pastures to Teachers' Union

In the 17th century Steenen Koraal was a maize plot with grazing rights for 80 goats. Goat farming remained central to the estate through the centuries, until the 20th-century government bought the plantation for housing development. The landhuis at the centre of it survived. The previous owner had restored the house, deepened the wells, installed windmills, and strung barbed wire before selling. In the 1930s the government made the landhuis available to the scouting movement. After that it housed several families in succession. In the early 1970s the Algemene Antilliaanse Padvindersvereniging used it, then other occupants passed through, and the house fell gradually into decline. Since 1980, SITEK, the Curaçao teachers' union, has had its headquarters in this modest landhuis. It is not one of the island's grandest estates, but it occupies a role you don't find in guidebooks: the place where teachers organise. Worth noting for anyone interested in the island's civic life beyond the obvious tourist sights. The neighbourhood around it is now mostly suburban housing, but the landhuis's original footprint, water features, and walled plots remain legible to anyone who knows to look.

Landhuis Suikertuintje: Sugar Garden at the Edge of the City

Suikertuintje sits just north-east of Willemstad's Schottegat, a small estate whose name, 'little sugar garden', tells you exactly what it once produced. Among the hundreds of working plantations on Curaçao, few persisted with sugarcane for long; the island's climate was simply too dry for the scale of sugar-growing that worked in Suriname or the larger Caribbean islands. Suikertuintje nevertheless tried, and the name stuck. The landhuis has stood through the shift from sugar to mixed agriculture to country retreat to modern suburb. It is captured in a 1964 photograph by Boy Lawson (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen) in the kind of long, reflective light that made the landhuizen photographable subjects for earlier generations of Dutch archive photographers. Today Suikertuintje is surrounded by modern Willemstad: shopping centres, residential neighbourhoods, and a shopping district that has made the estate name into a commercial brand for the area. The landhuis itself is dwarfed by its surroundings, a preserved island within a 21st-century urban setting, the way many of Curaçao's near-Willemstad landhuizen have ended up. Drive past Suikertuintje and you are looking at the centuries-old kernel of what the shopping district is still named after.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Urdal: Modest and Partly Documented

Urdal, also known historically as Roozendaal and Arrarat, is a 19th-century buitenverblijf in the eastern peripheral area of Willemstad. The landhuis is a single-storey house with a few dormer windows. Its ownership history is still unclear; the Landhuizen van Curaçao project has not yet pinned down the founders or the detailed sequence of owners. This entry exists to mark the place in the catalogue and to be honest about what is and is not known. For every Brievengat or Chobolobo with a well-documented history, there are Urdals: modest estates that have persisted into the 21st century without yet receiving the archival attention they deserve. Urdal's neighbours are Bona Vista and Klein Bloempot, placing it in a cluster of smaller peripheral landhuizen. When further research emerges, this entry will grow. For now Urdal is representative of the 'long tail' of Curaçao landhuizen: the ones that survive by persistence rather than by fame. The monument register fills in part of the picture. Urdal was one of the smaller estates around the Schottegat; its house was built as a country retreat in the second half of the 19th century and lies in a hofi, a cultivated garden plot, south of the Urdalweg. The register describes the house as two block-shaped parts, each under its own hipped roof (a roof that slopes down on all four sides) with finials, small upright ornaments, on the ridge ends, and next to it are a cistern, a well and a water reservoir.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Van Engelen: The Founder's Second Plantation

Landhuis Van Engelen is named after Willebrord van Engelen, temporary director of the Dutch West India Company, who founded it alongside his other plantation Engelenberg (later merged into Cas Abou). The 34-hectare plantation was not an agricultural success. Experiments with tobacco cultivation and aloe never took off commercially. An orange orchard also failed. Vegetables and maize were grown for household use, but Van Engelen's economic significance was always modest. The landhuis architecturally is handsome. The core has a hipped roof with a generous eight dormer windows. Lean-to galleries wrap all four sides, making Van Engelen one of the more airy-looking landhuizen from any angle. The alternative names (De Hooijberg, Soar, Mount Vernon, Mount Vermount) show an owner or two flirting with aspirational American references. Van Engelen's neighbours are Bona Vista and De Hoop (1). Its land was modestly productive but never lucrative. Its current use is uncertain. It stands as the quieter sibling to Cas Abou: founded by the same man, lower-profile, still there. The monument register dates the house on stylistic grounds to the middle of the 18th century; it calls the steep hipped roof (a roof sloping down on all four sides) typical of that century and points to the baroque tops of the dormers, which curve in and out. In the second half of the 19th century the fairly small plantation turned into a country retreat, and after 1939 its land was divided into plots, so the house now stands on a hilltop in the middle of a residential area that carries the plantation's name. It sits on a low platform with full-width terraces at front and back and a cistern against the north wall, and four pilaster strips, flat upright bands set slightly forward of the wall, divide its front facade.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Veeris: Empty, Waiting, 108 Hectares of Backstory

Veeris is a landhuis now standing empty and visibly decaying, a reminder that protection without restoration is slow erosion. The plantation covered 108 hectares in its working days; livestock was the main operation. The names Union and Drie Gebroeders (Three Brothers) also belong to its history, but in the end the name Veeris stuck. The architecture is typical mid-scale Curaçao landhuis: a core with a saddle roof and dormer windows, with a gallery running along three sides under a lean-to roof. The east facade has a clean upper section above the core but a curved cornice above the gallery: a small architectural flourish. Both the east and west facades end in a triangular crowning gable. Symmetrical, balanced, dignified even in neglect. The neighbourhood around Veeris has changed; the landhuis itself awaits its turn. In a catalogue of 78 intact landhuizen, some are boutique hotels and museums, some are restaurants and art galleries, and some, like Veeris, are in the interstitial state: too well-built to collapse, too expensive to revive without a patron or purpose. The island has a long list of landhuizen waiting for their next chapter. The monument register dates the house to around 1800 and sees in its gables a style in transition: the curving lines at gallery level are combined with funnel-shaped gable ends, gables that narrow towards the top, topped by a small pediment, a low triangular crown. Inside, the sala, the main room, has arched and decorated openings, and outside a mangasina, or storehouse, is joined to the house by three arches, with a two-storey cistern, a privy, corrals and a fence with a gate nearby. The plantations Drie Gebroeders and Westerveld, whose first known owners were the Veeris family, were merged with Eendracht in the 1810s into the plantation Union, which later took the Veeris name; on which of these plantations the house first stood is not known.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Vredenberg: Two Storeys, Rebuilt and Restored

Vredenberg is a two-storey country retreat with a saddle roof and dormer windows. Both long sides carry galleries on both floors, each under a lean-to roof. Above the main entrance on the front, a balcony projects outward, giving the house an elegant vertical rhythm. The estate was always primarily a buitenverblijf, a country getaway for wealthy city residents, rather than a working plantation. Its exact construction date is not recorded, but the house was probably built in a single phase in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps in its last quarter. The alternative name Cunucu Abao (Papiamentu for 'lower field') places it in local geography more precisely than its formal title. A rebuilding in 1911 and a restoration in 1997 have preserved the structure through the century that saw many of its peers collapse. Much of the deeper history remains to be researched, which is itself a reminder that the 78 intact landhuizen of Curaçao are catalogued but not fully studied; there are decades of archive work still to do before every landhuis's story is known. Vredenberg sits between Koraal Specht and Saliña Abou, holding its ground quietly, awaiting the scholarship it deserves. The house stands at the northern edge of a flat, fairly damp stretch of land with several wells, and its hofi, a cultivated garden plot, still holds two wells, a water tank and dams. The front is regularly laid out in five vertical rows of openings, with sash windows that slide up and down on the upper floor, and a kitchen with an oven and a chimney is built onto the back. The year 1911 is marked on the balcony structure at the front, and a mangasina (storehouse), a cistern, part of the old boundary wall and an outbuilding from 1907 complete the group.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Wechi: 200 Years in One Family

Plantage Wechi (also spelled Weitje, and alternatively known as Klein Malpais, Rustplaats, or Daantje Boom) was a 133-hectare estate. The name Wechi or Weitje probably derives from Weit Timmer, owner around the middle of the 18th century. From the beginning of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, the plantation remained in the hands of the same family: a continuity of nearly 200 years that is rare even by Curaçao standards. The early-19th-century landhuis has a core with a saddle roof and dormer windows. Lean-to-roofed galleries run along both long sides. The gable ends are clean, simple, not decorated like the baroque-era landhuizen but balanced and dignified. The estate was renovated a few years ago, bringing the building out of a period of quiet neglect. Wechi's neighbours are Rustplaats (one of its alternative names, now applied to a separate nearby landhuis) and Zorgendal. The two-century family ownership is the key data point: very few properties on Curaçao stayed in one family from the 1810s through the 1990s. That kind of continuity tends to preserve a building better than any formal heritage designation, because each generation had a reason to maintain it. Until the early 18th century this land was part of the extensive Malpais plantation; Wechi took its final shape around 1818, and according to the monument register it never became a prosperous estate. High in each pointed gable, the triangular end wall, are three wooden wall anchors, which tie the roof timbers to the masonry at the level of the purlins, the long beams that carry the rafters. In the galleries the rafters of round timber are left in view, and the kitchen with its fogon, an open cooking hearth, is in the rear gallery; a mangasina (storehouse), a corral, a well and a water reservoir complete the complex.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Zeelandia: Retirement Home Behind Baroque Gables

The imposing Landhuis Zeelandia has a cross-shaped core with the north-south block rising to two storeys. The saddle roof carries dormer windows, and the east and west facades are elegantly decorated with volutes and arched top finishes. The north and south facades are simpler: a low pointed gable to one side, a tall one to the other. The east and west wings have open galleries along all sides, with lean-to roofs supported by colonnades. The north-south block dates from the 19th century; the east-west section is older and was begun in the 18th century. Near the landhuis stands a long and imposing outbuilding, though of later date. It was constructed in 1945 as an extension to the retirement home that occupied the landhuis at the time. It has a saddle roof and open galleries along both long sides: fifteen open arches on the south-west side, thirteen open and two closed arches on the north-east side, plus a projecting central entrance with extra arches. The decorative top gables, with their elaborately in- and out-swinging contours, spiral ornaments, and arched top finishes, echo the style of Brievengat. Zeelandia was originally a country retreat for wealthy city dwellers. The adjoining plantation was only 39 hectares and produced little of commercial value. From before the 20th century until 1983 the estate served as a retirement home: 'Koningin Wilhelmina'. Since then its purpose has been unclear; the building awaits its next chapter. Its baroque architectural flourishes and the visible family resemblance to Brievengat keep it among the most architecturally significant of the secondary-tier landhuizen. The monument register cites Ozinga (1959), who distinguished four building phases: the northwest part from around 1760, its extension to the southeast from around 1800, and two two-storey cross wings added shortly after each other in the second half of the 19th century. The galleries of the two oldest wings rest on short round columns standing on a low parapet wall, each with an eight-sided capital, the widened head of a column, and each of the four slopes of their roof carries a dormer with a strongly curving top. The house stands on a hill near the former east shore of the Schottegat; the restoration of around 1985 changed its layout, facades and details and altered the gables drastically, while the long 1945 wing falls outside the protected monument.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Landhuis Zuurzak (Sorsaka): Country House with Pyramid-Roofed Towers

Zuurzak, locally Sorsaka after the soursop fruit, is a landhuis with flanking outbuildings that include small towers under pyramid-shaped roofs. The estate lies in the east of the island, south of the Caracasbaaiweg. In the 19th and 20th centuries Zuurzak reinvented itself more than once. Like several country houses near the city, it served periods as a private getaway, then as a government-adjacent property. The current structure, with its distinctive ancillary buildings, has been preserved despite decades where maintenance was irregular. Today Zuurzak stands quietly in its eastern setting, not a major tourist stop but a characteristic Curaçao landhuis in its own right. The symmetry of the main house and the small flanking structures gives visitors who pass an immediate sense of its original scale and ambition. The monument register gives the estate firmer dates: Zuurzak is mentioned as early as 1688 as the site of the West India Company's largest slave camp, where enslaved people were kept for a time after arriving on the island to recover their strength, and in the 18th century the farming here included indigo. A memorial stone in the patio gives 1725 as the year the house was built and records an alteration in 1876 for the businessman M.B. Gorsira, who used it as a country house; the arcade, a row of arches that closes off the patio, and the neoclassical detailing, a style based on Greek and Roman forms, almost certainly date from that time. The government restored the house in 1977 and 1978 as the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Curaçao, and a further major restoration in 1991 renewed the entire roof structure of the house and the outbuildings around it.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Ruïne Choloma: Former Ostrich Farm

Choloma was split off from plantation Groot Sint Joris in 1893, a small estate roughly 1500 x 750 metres. The landhuis was built between 1893 and 1896 for a family named Debrot. In the first half of the 20th century the estate primarily farmed ostriches, an unusual specialty for Curaçao. Little is known about the name, except that the Debrot family is thought to have also owned a plantation called Choloma in Colombia. The house is built from three parallel one-storey sections, each under its own pitched roof between plain gables, with an addition on the southwest side holding a kitchen with an oven and a cistern; unusually, the front faces north. Above the central door is a plastered dove, and each tall shutter window on either side has a round-arched drip moulding above it, a small ledge that throws rainwater off the wall, resting on decorative brackets. The house was built on low ground south of Landhuis Groot Sint Joris; in front of it lies a short terrace floored with white and grey marble tiles, and close by are a round well, a water tank and a mangasina (storehouse) with a stable.

Ruïne Fuik: 18th-Century Grand Estate, Now Remote and Closed

The ruins of Fuik lie deep in the closed-off eastern part of Curaçao. The landhuis, built around 1789, had a core with a saddle roof and dormer windows. Later the attic level was demolished and the building was given a lower roof; wraparound enclosed galleries ran around it. Two outbuildings still show volute-accented tops and a scrolled crowning. On small shield plaques the date 'March 1789' was once visible. Impressive fence posts with decorated tops stood at the southern entrance and near the house; copies are now in the Curaçaosch Museum. Plantation Fuik was consolidated with Oostpunt in the early 19th century, then later merged with Duivelsklip and Santa Barbara: a classic pattern of large-estate amalgamation.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Ruïne Newtown / Jeremi: Built for a Manganese Mine That Didn't Deliver

Jeremi, also Newton or Jeremi-Newton, is not really a classical landhuis. Built in 1880 on the orders of John Godden to support a manganese mining operation, the long two-storey building has a saddle roof and a style rarely seen on Curaçao. That roof was laid with red tiles made in England. The house is one of three buildings in a small industrial complex on the border of the former plantations Lagoen and Zevenbergen, together with a smaller two-storey building and a long single-storey hall with a cistern built against it; southeast of them, on both sides of a large dam, lie the remains of buildings that served the mine. Godden called it Newton; the local name Jeremi (from the nearby bay) won out. The manganese deposit quickly disappointed, and the house was abandoned. Later it served briefly for scouting. Today the building is uninhabitable: parts of both the floor and the roof are missing. It is a 19th-century industrial structure, slowly losing its battle with time. The complex stands at the foot of the Shete Seroe, about 800 metres from the bay of Jeremi, and the monument register compares its way of building with the oldest buildings of the Nieuwpoort complex. The walls of the main building are of stacked natural stone, thicker on the ground floor than on the upper floor, with the corners and openings edged in red machine-made brick. The zigzag-shaped roof tiles carry the maker's mark of Browne & Co, Bridgwater, and the register lists these rare building materials and methods among the reasons the complex is protected.

Foto © Michael A. Newton, curacaomonuments.org

Ruïne Noordkant: WIC Cattle Plantation, Briefly a Slave Camp

Around 1700 the 593-hectare plantation Noordkant belonged to the Dutch West India Company. Its primary activity was livestock. In the third quarter of the 17th century, before the WIC ownership, the site operated for a period as a slave camp, adding Noordkant to the uncomfortable list of early-colonial sites with that history. The 19th-century landhuis has a core with saddle roof and four dormer windows, galleries with lean-to roofs on both sides, and separate kitchen, mangasina, and reservoir buildings attached. One gable shows the year 1857, when the house was fully restored. In 1987 it was extensively altered, not always successfully. Despite both rounds of work, the building is now in extremely poor condition. The estate lies along the north coast on a series of natural terraces, with the house on the edge of the second-to-last one; the house may go back to the 18th century, but little apart from its layout still shows it. The 1857 date is set in the top of the western gable (the end wall under the roof), where a doorway once led out onto a wooden balcony that is now gone, while the top of the eastern gable has two wooden wall anchors, one above the other, which tie the roof timbers to the masonry. The complex also has a coach house and corrals, and at some distance a horse stable, a well and a tanki, a pond that collects rainwater; the monument register singles out the roof construction, the use of brick, the roof of the mangasina and the cistern as features of historical value.

Ruïne Raphael: A Classicist Front Above the Piscadera Inner Bay

Raphael began as a plantation in the early eighteenth century, set between Veeris and the Groot and Klein Piscadera estates and reaching down to the inner bay of Piscadera. The name is that of Raphael Correa, one of its first owners. In 1852 the estate was bought by William C. Jones, and it remained in the hands of his descendants for sixty-five years. What set Raphael apart came later. In the nineteenth century a classicist wing of two storeys was built directly in front of the older house. The combined building stood on a hill, reached by a staircase at the front, and ranked among the more imposing estate houses on the island. That grand front section has since collapsed. At the rear, rooms arranged around a courtyard still stand. The caretaker couple Willems, headed by Arnoldus 'Shon Nolly' Willems, kept watch over the property into the 1980s, and in 1982 Maria Elisabeth Hartmann, a descendant of the Jones family, came with relatives to photograph what remained of the house.

Ruïne Rif (Rif Sint Marie): Falling Apart, Restoration Begun

Rif (also Rif Sint Marie, Klein Santa Marie, or Santa Marie) is a T-shaped landhuis dating from around 1840. The original saddle roof had dormer windows; a nearly continuous lean-to-roofed gallery wrapped the structure. On the southwest side two outbuildings connected to the house served as kitchen and service rooms, each with its own saddle roof. A large terrace had three staircases. Photographs from 2018 show only one of the probable six original dormer windows still standing; shortly afterward even that one collapsed. As of mid-2025 the landhuis is officially declared inaccessible due to collapse risk. In 2026 a restoration was begun. A Lakeview Residence development is also planned for the adjacent grounds: a 2020s-style mixed-heritage-and-new-construction approach that is increasingly common on Curaçao.

Ruïne Santa Catharina: Cotton, Beans, Briefly a Retirement Home

Plantation Santa Catharina was 604 hectares: one of the larger estates on Curaçao. Cotton, beans, maize, and peanuts were cultivated; livestock was raised. In the 20th century the landhuis served briefly as a retirement home before falling into its current state. The early-19th-century landhuis has a core with a saddle roof (no dormer windows) and lean-to-roofed galleries along both long sides. An arch once carried the name painted above the terrace staircase; the arch has disappeared over the years. Only the walls remain, standing open to the sky, which is exactly why photographers seek it out. It is one of the more atmospheric ruins on Curaçao, with its yellow walls, cactus-colonised interior, and wood-beamed roof partially collapsed. Located in Banda Abou, no entry fee.