Curaçao Liqueur

How did the island of Curaçao get its name? A popular theory suggests that Portuguese cartographers combined what the Spanish called it: “corazon” (meaning heart) along with Portuguese words for “heart” (coraçao) and “healing” (cura) after scurvy prone sailors who were miraculously cured after eating the island’s abundant fruit.

A few years later, in the early 1500s, Spaniards introduced Valencia orange trees to Curaçao. Rather than flourish, the orange trees produced a small and bitter fruit rather than a tasty orange.

Eager to make “lemonade” out of this experience, the islanders experimented until the found a way to take the dried peels of these oranges and create a tasty orange flavored liqueur.

Locals called the drink “Laraha” but along the way, it became known as Curaçao. The traditional blue color is simply due to food coloring.

There are now 10 different flavors of liqueur produced on the island of Curaçao. We sampled three of them after our distillery tour.

After which, as I’d promised myself, I enjoyed a frozen coffee drink with a shot of coffee flavored Curaçao. Yum!Read more