City overview

Curaçao is a Dutch Caribbean island 40 miles off the Venezuelan coast, where pastel-coloured colonial waterfronts, a UNESCO-listed capital and more than 35 named beaches sit inside a dry, cactus-studded landscape that stays warm and largely rainless all year. Willemstad is the centre of everything — the floating Queen Emma Bridge, the Handelskade merchant houses and the island's museums — while the western half of the island holds the cliff-backed coves, national parks and reef diving. Jewish life on Curaçao goes back to the 1650s and the community today numbers under 350. Orthodox life on the island runs through Shaarei Tsedek in the Mahaai district, an Ashkenazi congregation founded in 1959 and led since 2017 by Rabbi Refoel and Chani Silver as Chabad of Curaçao, which also supplies the island's only kosher food.