Caribbean Netherlands

The Caribbean Netherlands are the islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, special municipalities of the Netherlands in the Caribbean. Bonaire lies off the coast of Venezuela, while Saba and Sint Eustatius sit in the Lesser Antilles south of Sint Maarten, and Kralendijk on Bonaire is the seat of the largest island.

Caquetío people, a branch of the Arawak who came from Venezuela, lived on Bonaire and left rock paintings in caves such as Onima and Spelonk. Alonso de Ojeda reached the area in 1499, and the Spanish named Bonaire and its neighbors the islands of the giants after the tall people they met. The Dutch took Bonaire in March 1636, and it became a plantation of the Dutch West India Company, where salt was gathered from the salt pans.

Sint Eustatius grew so rich from trade that it was nicknamed the Golden Rock, with 75 plantations recorded by 1774. On 16 November 1776 the American brig Andrew Doria fired a salute to Fort Oranje, and Governor Johannes de Graeff answered with cannon fire, an early foreign recognition of the flag of the American revolutionaries. The three islands later belonged to the Netherlands Antilles until its breakup on 10 October 2010, when they became public bodies of the Netherlands; their residents first voted in a Dutch general election in 2012.

Each island has its own council and governor, while the National Office for the Caribbean Netherlands handles taxes, policing, health, education and social security for the Dutch government. As overseas territories of the European Union, the islands are not bound by EU law automatically, and many Dutch laws have a special Caribbean version. The Bonaire National Marine Park protects the reefs of Bonaire and Klein Bonaire, and Mount Scenery on Saba, 870 m (2,850 ft) high, is the highest point of the three islands.