Curacao

Abandoned orange trees, and the Dutch conquest of a Spanish colony: the story of how the iconic curaçao liqueur came to be.

Curaçao is available in myriad hues today (and even in its original colourless form), but it is the orange and brilliant blue versions that are most iconic. While the story of curaçao (the liqueur) has only the haziest of shapes at this time (some accounts say a version of it was already being produced in Flanders), it does come into sharper focus in the second half of the century. By this time — this would have been in the early 1630s — the island of Curaçao had passed into Dutch hands.