San Nicolas

San Nicolas is twenty minutes south of Oranjestad and seems twenty years removed from the resort economy. I drove there on my third day, following a recommendation from a woman selling pastechi in the capital who said, in accented English with an air of someone sharing something she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to share: “Go see the murals. Eat at Charlie’s. Come back.” She was right on all three points.

The city grew up around the Lago oil refinery, which at its 1940s peak employed around eight thousand workers from sixty-two countries, making San Nicolas a genuinely international place long before globalization became a word. The refinery’s oscillating fortunes — peak operations in the 1940s, partial closures, reactivations, current reduced operations — shaped the city’s character in ways that Oranjestad, with its colonial Dutch heritage and cruise ship commerce, never experienced. San Nicolas was a company town, then an abandoned town, then a reinvented town. The murals are the reinvention.

The Aruba Art Fair began in 2015 as an annual event that brought international street artists to the city for a week of mural-making. What they left behind is now everywhere: entire building facades covered in work of genuine quality, not the generic tropical beach imagery that tourist murals tend toward but actual art — portraits that contain specific persons, abstracted landscapes with Caribbean color logic, political imagery that addresses the colonial history directly. I walked the main streets for two hours with my phone mostly in my pocket, which is the best indication of quality I can give. A mural by a Colombian artist near the old Lago building showed a woman’s face in which a whole refinery was reflected, the industrial infrastructure mapped onto human features. I stood there long enough that a local man asked if I was alright.

Charlie’s Bar is an institution in the most literal sense — opened in 1941, originally serving refinery workers, now serving everyone while being absolutely clear that it is not there to serve the Instagram trade. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with objects: license plates, sports memorabilia, signed photos, diving helmets, things that accumulate in a bar over eighty years when no one makes any decisions about curation. The garlic shrimp are legendary and deserved — fat, aggressive with garlic and lime, served with bread for the sauce. I ate at the bar on a Tuesday afternoon and talked to a man named Dennis who’d worked in the refinery in the 1980s and remembered when this street was twenty bars, not two.

Carnival in San Nicolas runs differently than the formal parade in Oranjestad. The San Nicolas parades are smaller, more neighborhood-specific, with a rawer energy — costumes assembled over months in family carports, music that begins around midnight and doesn’t stop until the light changes. If you’re on the island in February, spend at least one Carnival evening here rather than the official stands in Oranjestad. The difference is the difference between watching a ceremony and being inside it.

The Sunday afternoon street market near the main square draws vendors from across the island and functions less as a tourist market than as an actual neighborhood gathering — produce from the few small farms that persist in the interior, handmade items, food stands operating out of the backs of vans. I bought a jar of homemade pika — the Aruban hot sauce of chili, onion, and vinegar — from a woman who told me the recipe was her grandmother’s, and it’s been in my bag ever since.

When to go: San Nicolas during Carnival (January through March, with the main parades in February) is its most itself — raw, communal, and entirely unlike the resort version of the island. The Aruba Art Fair typically happens in October and brings new murals each year. For the murals themselves, any time works; mornings before noon offer the most direct light for seeing the full color range.