Curaçao

Other highly recommendable beaches which do not own a website are:

• Playa Abou (“Grote Knip”) @ Knip
• Lagun Beach & Dive @ Lagun
• Playa Forti @ Westpunt
• Baja Beach @ Caracasbaai
• Sunset Waters @ Sta Martha

Grote Knip is famous for its (photo) sight on the relatively large beach.

The rocky beach of Baja Beach is not so great to lay down, but its snorkling site is superb, with the tugboat wreck clearly visible at ~5m depth after a ~50m swim.

Sunset Waters is an abandoned hotel and currently a ruin. Its (photo) location is however awesome, as well as the curvy road to it, from the Sta Martha village on, giving about halfway a fantastic postcard view over the Sta Martha bay with the mountains of Banda’bou (“Zevenbergen”) and Mt Christoffel (peak of 375m) in the scenery.

Some links on this page have a “@ Place” suffix so that you can quickly see where exactly it is located. Most of them are suburbs of Willemstad. They are shown in the below picture (click to enlarge; note: it does not show all suburbs, only the ones mentioned here and some major ones):

Only Jan Kok, St Willibrordus, St Marie, Sta Martha, Lagun, Knip, Westpunt and Savonet are not suburbs of Willemstad. They are villages in the rural area called Banda’bou (“Downside”), on the western half of the island. Willemstad covers the eastern half as shown in the image, which is called Banda’riba (“Upside”).

Usually, it’s 30~35 degrees celsius during daytime and 20~25 degrees during night, all year round. Jan-Aug is mostly dry and windy. Rain will mostly occur during night only or (very) locally during daytime. Sep-Oct is also dry but less windy. Sometimes the wind is even totally absent, making it feel very hot and stuffy. Rain will occur more often during daytime. Nov-Dec is mostly but not constantly rainy.

Jun-Nov is the Atlantic hurricane season. Curaçao lies on the corner of the so-called “Hurricane belt”. It’s thanks to the land mass of Venezuela never directly hit by a hurricane, but it is often indirectly affected by a hurricane meandering elsewhere in the Atlantic bassin, consuming all the trade winds, which is noticable by less wind or even a complete gray cloud cover for some days. On the other hand, several tropical storms have directly hit Curaçao. The latest which did so was Tomas in Nov 2010, leaving ~265mm of precipitation (half of annual average!) in only 24 hours.