Is Klein Curaçao Worth Visiting?

Klein Curaçao costs around $150 a head and takes a whole day, two hours of which are spent on open water most people find uncomfortable. It is entirely reasonable to want a straight answer before committing to that, and most of what is written about the island is a sales pitch.

So: it is worth it for a specific kind of visitor, and genuinely not worth it for others. Here is how to tell which you are.

What you are actually buying

Not a beach. Curaçao’s own coast has excellent beaches — Kenepa, Cas Abao, Porto Mari, Playa Lagun — twenty to forty minutes from Willemstad, for the price of a car park and a beach chair. If a beautiful Caribbean beach is the goal, you can have one this afternoon for under $20.

What this day sells is three things you cannot get on the main island:

Emptiness. A flat, uninhabited coral island, fifteen miles offshore, with one white beach running most of its western length and no buildings on it beyond a ruined lighthouse keeper’s house and the operators’ own beach shelters. Nobody lives there. Nobody has ever lived there.

A reef you can swim to. The bottom shelves from sand into seagrass into living coral a few metres off the beach, in water clear enough to read from the surface. Green turtles feed in the shallows as a matter of routine rather than luck. This is genuinely better than most shore snorkelling on the main island, and you do not need a boat once you are there. More on the snorkelling.

A day at sea. For some people that is the point and for others it is the price. Which one you are determines most of this page.

The four objections, taken seriously

“It’s expensive”

$140 to $160 per person, including breakfast, a barbecue lunch, snorkel gear and a thirty-mile round trip by sea across a nine-hour day. Measured per hour, or against what a boat costs to run fifteen miles offshore and back, it is not expensive.

Measured against a day on Curaçao’s own beaches, it plainly is — thirty to fifty times as much. Both statements are true. The question is whether the emptiness and the reef are worth that multiple to you, and only you can price that.

“The boat ride is too long”

One to two hours each way depending on the operator, and the morning leg runs into the prevailing wind and swell. The afternoon leg runs with it and is noticeably calmer. Reviews on all four boats follow the same pattern — warm about the island, candid about the morning.

If reading that makes you uneasy, take the unease seriously. There is no way off in the middle. Which boat and which seat help, and what to do instead if the answer is that nothing does.

“Is there enough to do for a whole day?”

You get five to six hours ashore. What fills them: swimming, snorkelling the reef edge, a forty-minute round-trip walk across open scrub to the pink lighthouse and the rusting hull on the windward side, lunch, and sitting still.

That is the complete list. There is no bar you have not paid for, no shop, no watersports centre, no second beach to wander to. Some people find six hours of that restorative and others find it long. If you are the second kind, this is a real objection rather than a squeamish one, and “book something else” is a legitimate answer.

“Is it crowded?”

Four scheduled day boats anchor off the same stretch of sand, which puts a few hundred people on the island on a normal day. They spread along a long beach and the operators’ shelters sit apart from one another, so it does not feel packed — but “deserted island” describes the geography, not a Tuesday in high season.

Who should go

• Anyone who snorkels, or wants to. The reef here justifies the trip on its own.
• People comfortable on boats, who like a day at sea as part of the experience rather than despite it.
• Visitors with a week or more on Curaçao, who have already seen the mainland beaches and want something the island cannot otherwise offer.
• Photographers. The lighthouse, the wreck and the empty sand are the frames people come back with.
• Couples and groups who will make a day of it and are not counting the hours.

Who should probably skip it

• Anyone strongly prone to motion sickness. Two hours into a Caribbean swell with no way off is a bad day, and no boat or tablet changes that.
• Families with very young children, unless the children are genuinely happy on boats. The island suits them; the crossing does not. More on going with children.
• Anyone with two or three days on Curaçao. One of them is a large fraction of your trip, and the mainland has more to show you for it.
• Cruise passengers on a standard day call. The hours do not fit and the return time is not yours to control. Why.
• People who want facilities, variety or a bar they did not pay for in advance. The island has none of those.

What we would actually say

If you have a week on Curaçao, you snorkel, and boats do not trouble you, go — and go early in the stay so a weather cancellation has somewhere to move to. Book a boat with a beach house, because shade and a toilet on a treeless sandbar are worth the $15 difference several times over.

If two of the three do not apply, spend the $150 on two excellent mainland beach days and a good dinner, and do not feel you have missed the point of Curaçao. You have not.

Compare the four boats, see what each price buys, or check availability if the answer is yes.