Jan Thiel

Jan Thiel lies east of Willemstad, on the calm side of the island. The beach is the social one, with bars, restaurants and loungers to rent; behind it, a path from the old plantation house leads through dry woodland to the saliñas, basins where seawater was once left to evaporate into salt, now crusted pink and visited by the odd flamingo.

A few minutes along the coast, the Caracas Bay peninsula separates the open sea from the inland lagoon of Spanish Water. It holds a ruined eighteenth-century fort, an abandoned quarantine house, a hill with a view over the lagoon and, just off a public beach, the island’s most visited little wreck.

• The Jan Thiel saliñas Abandoned salt basins beside a lagoon behind the beach, their crust tinted pink, reached on foot through the woods.
• Tugboat Beach A free public beach where a tug sunk in the 1980s rests upright, a few metres out and about five metres down, now thick with coral.
• Caracas Bay peninsula Fort Beekenburg in ruins, Kabrietenberg hill above Spanish Water, and a pier where coral is being regrown.