History and Culture

History and Culture

Although many islanders claim that the name Bonaire comes from the French for "good air," this explanation is unlikely, particularly since the island was never colonized by the French. The island was first inhabited by an Amerindian people (related to the Arawaks) called the Caquetios. Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci landed here in 1499 and claimed it for Spain. It seems likely that they adopted the Amerindian name for the island, which probably sounded very much like Bonaire and which meant "low country." Because the Spanish found little use for the island except as a penal colony, the original inhabitants were shipped off to work on the plantations of Hispaniola, and Bonaire remained largely undeveloped. When the Dutch seized the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao in 1633, they started building the salt industry in Bonaire, which fueled the economy then and which remains an important industry today.

The majority of the 14,000 inhabitants live in and around the capital, Kralendijk. The word almost universally applied to this diminutive city with a downtown area that can be traversed in under three minutes is "cute." Part of the Netherlands Antilles, Bonaire is actually governed from neighboring Curaçao. Legislation has been signed that would see the islands of Bonaire, Saba, and St. Eustatius becoming directly part of the Netherlands, with Curaçao and St. Martin becoming autonomous entities within the Kingdom of the Netherlands but implementation has been delayed.