BONBINI TO BONAIRE

The first Europeans Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci came to Bonaire in 1499 and claimed it for Spain. In 1633, the Dutch took possession of Curacao, Bonaire and Aruba. Bonaire became a plantation island belonging to the Dutch West Indies Company. African slaves were forced to work, cutting dyewood and cultivating maize and harvesting solar salt. Grim reminders of those days still remain in the form of slave huts and salt pans which were laboriously constructed by hand. Until 1816, ownership of Bonaire changed hands a number of times, finally being returned that year to the Dutch as a result of the Treaty of Paris. A small fort, Fort Oranje, was built to protect the island’s main resource, ”salt”. Salt was one commodity that Bonaire had in endless supply, although it took back breaking slave labor to produce it. The abolition of slavery in 1863 signaled an end to the era of exploitation of those first Bonaireans. Bonaire together with Sint Eustatius and Saba as of October 10, 2010 forming the BES islands have voted to have direct ties with the Netherlands and have become a Dutch municipality holding its own flag with adjustment for their small size, their distance from the Netherlands and their geographical situation in the Caribbean region, thus constituting “the Caribbean part of the Netherlands”.