Pietermaai

I found Pietermaai by accident, which is the best way. I was walking east from Punda along the waterfront, past the ferry terminals and the small commercial harbor, and the street began to change: the buildings got lower and more varied, there were outdoor tables where people were actually drinking at three in the afternoon, a gallery with its door open and a ceiling fan spinning inside, a woman painting something large on a canvas she’d propped against an almond tree. The neighborhood didn’t announce itself. It just started happening.

Pietermaai is a strip of nineteenth-century plantation-era townhouses running roughly parallel to the sea, east of Willemstad’s historic center. The houses are long and low, built in a Dutch tropical vernacular that’s different from the taller Handelskade buildings — more intimate, with covered verandahs and deep shuttered windows and inner courtyards that the street doesn’t reveal. About fifteen years ago, a combination of local entrepreneurs and foreign investment began converting these crumbling buildings into boutique hotels, restaurants, and bars. The conversion has been, more or less, a success — meaning the neighborhood is now genuinely alive rather than merely gentrified, and the people drinking on the terraces on a Tuesday evening are roughly equally local and visiting.

The food in Pietermaai is the most internationally ambitious on the island. I ate sashimi at a Japanese-Curaçaoan fusion spot where the chef was from Osaka and had lived in Willemstad for twelve years. I drank a cocktail made with Curaçao liqueur — the genuine blue-orange variety from the Senior distillery, not the blue cheap stuff — and a Dominican rum at a bar where the music was something I couldn’t identify but felt like it had roots in several continents at once. The next night I found a place doing a rabbit stew with local spices that made me think of Provence, then made me stop thinking about Provence because it was its own thing entirely.

The hotels here are small — eight rooms, twelve rooms, some have a pool that fits ten people with friendly intentions. They are set around the original courtyard of the plantation house, and the architectural bones are intact: the arched entrances, the hardwood floors, the peculiar proportions of rooms designed for a different century’s understanding of heat and privacy. I stayed in one for three nights and woke each morning to the sound of roosters and then the sound of traffic and then the smell of coffee from the shared terrace. The combination felt very right.

The eastern end of the strip, where Pietermaai meets the Caracasbaai road, is quieter and more residential, and I walked it at different times of day for the light: the way the late afternoon sun hits the painted facades and makes the pastels go almost fluorescent, the way the street goes dark and warm in the evening with the terrace lights, the way early morning it belongs completely to the rooster and the delivery truck and the cat who lived in the almond tree.

When to go: Pietermaai is year-round but most alive Thursday through Saturday evenings when the restaurants and bars are at capacity. Weekday afternoons are the best time to walk the strip and see the architecture without the evening crowd. The neighborhood’s small hotels book up months in advance in January through March — reserve early or go in May or October when prices drop and the neighborhood loosens up.