Island spirit of Curaçao

HIDDEN GEMS:A BOTTLE of the distinctive blue liqueur known as curacao is a familiar sight in cocktail bars around the world.

But curacao isn’t naturally blue. Made on the Caribbean island of the same name, the drink is distilled from the bitter and otherwise inedible laraha citrus fruit. The colourless alcohol, with an orangey taste, is coloured blue to give it an exotic appearance.

Like the equally lurid advocaat and chartreuse, it is rarely drunk alone; instead it is mixed to form a heady cocktail.

The Dutch company Bols, which produces a popular brand of the liqueur, has recipes for more than 1,000 cocktails featuring blue curacao, with names ranging from Jaded Lady to Irish Monarch (which is topped with a green cherry).

The island of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, covers about 450sq km – half the size of Co Dublin – with a population of about 140,000. It was discovered by Spanish explorers in 1499, then colonised by the Dutch in 1634. Today it forms part of the Dutch Antilles, a Caribbean outpost of the Netherlands.

Once a centre of the slave trade, the island is now one of the most affluent in the Caribbean, thanks to oil refining, a financial-services industry and a growing number of tourists, particularly scuba-divers attracted by its coral reefs.

The capital, Willemstad (above), is a lovely port town with attractive Dutch and Spanish colonial-style buildings in ice-cream colours. The island is popular with holidaymakers and retirees from the Netherlands.

But there’s a fly in the ointment of this little paradise. Most of the beaches are man-made and protected by breakwaters from the pounding high waves. But it does lie outside the hurricane belt.

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