Curacao offers colorful backdrop on land and sea

CBS News -

No wonder the island's famous liqueur is so luminous.

Curacao liqueur, known around the world for coloring tropical drinks a vibrant blue, is far from the only colorful sight on this kaleidoscopic island that can make visitors feel like they are walking, or sometimes even floating, inside a resplendent painting. From mesmerizingly decorative buildings to lush coral reefs beneath sparkling turquoise waters, this Dutch Caribbean island has more than enough attractions on land and under the sea to keep visitors restfully busy for a week.

Hundreds of buildings are marked as monuments to the island's cultural history, including the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Western hemisphere and a church with a cannonball stuck in the wall. There's also a floating market of boats that come from Venezuela about 35 miles away and a hotel built into a waterfront fortress - its ramparts now house a swimming pool, restaurant and bar.

Excellent snorkeling and scuba diving are strong draws to a place that provides a mix of the outdoors and festivities after dark. The island offers something in between the attractions of its neighbors: all-nature-all-the-time Bonaire and the more beach-and-party-oriented Aruba.

Curacao became an independent country within the kingdom of the Netherlands in October but its ties to the Netherlands date to 1634, when a Dutch trading settlement was established here. Fortresses built along the water now house shops and restaurants. Historic buildings earned the island's capital, Willemstad, designation as a World Heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1997.

When UNESCO decided to put Willemstad on a list of the world's most culturally important cities, the group cited several distinct historic districts reflecting styles from the Netherlands, Spanish and Portuguese colonial towns that traded with the island, which developed into a highly diverse community over three centuries.

Despite its inclusion on a list with some of the world's top tourist destinations, Willemstad can have the feel of a place that hasn't been fully discovered yet by many travelers. During a walking tour earlier this year of the downtown area, only one tourist showed up, a visitor from the United States.

Gerda Gehlen, division head of the island's Monument Bureau, normally gives the tour in Dutch but graciously accommodated the guest by shifting to English. While cruise ships stop for a day, recent advertisements in scuba diving magazines highlight the island's "conspicuous lack of crowds."

"There's no better place to get away than a place nobody's ever heard of," the ad says beneath a photo of a diver next to a large school of fish.

Most of the buildings display a unique mingling of classic Dutch design with Caribbean influences. Steep gabled roofs with flowing contours cap structures popping with pastel colors. Stucco walls used to cover up the rough building materials like coral stone are festooned with many brightly painted shutters. Decorative verandahs and porches round out a captivating Caribbean flair.

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