Hi dear, I hope is all well with you!

I am not here to take your time and debate talking  about over tourism that is killing  Aruba, everyone talks about it anyway but with little real effect!

Supermarket are packed with people in bikinis, while shelves are empty and carts overflow with goods, half of which will probably be thrown away.

Is it called sustainability?

It is a grab-and-run tourism, from the 3 to 5 monstrous cruise ships vomiting thousands of sunburned tourists on the Island every day from November to April and unfortunately just a little less between June and October, to the people filling every flight for short 3 to 4 days “vacations,” an option that became possible with the proliferation of vacation rentals: every single square inch of the so called beaches is filled with flapping tents and beach chairs like an outdoor furniture market!

There is no respect left for anything or for anyone anymore, just a frantic race to claim the last spots of paradise, which honestly is not paradise anymore.

But let me get to the point!

Our beloved Fofoti trees, “protected” since a few years by some clear signs around them are now succumbing to pressure, victims of what we are experiencing every day in Aruba, uncontrolled hordes of unrespectful visitors, that of course do not even pay attention if there is a sign — I clearly experience that every day, visitors don’t read: After 10 years of running Terrazza Italiana this year I had to put up a hated sign, “no shirt no service.” That actually is NOT working as I am still turning away people every night – they are attempting to have dinner in bikini!

As it seems, nothing will change, it is getting worse, I just want to start a petition to physically protect the two Fofoti Trees, like it was done for the Shoko nests at the Divi. Signs no longer works, people treat the Fofoti in the way they treat the palapas, hanging bags and clothing items and soon we will see beach chairs appearing at 5am to claim the spot!

The sad part, no one is enforcing the rules about these protected trees.

Thank you for your time and commitment! Regards, Mimma.

Premiere: September 17, 2026 — Aruba

After a successful tour in the Netherlands and fourteen performances at the iconic Apollo Theater in New York, the theater production KINGS…come home will arrive in Aruba in September 2026.

The presentation of the work on the island takes place within the broader cultural program marking 40 years of Status Aparte and 50 years of Himno y Bandera. Within this commemorative year, Aruba reflects on its political, cultural and historical development. In that context, KINGS…come home contributes to a wider conversation about memory, identity and the meaning of home.

KINGS…come home is a powerful theater production conceived and directed by Ira Kip, who joins forces with her artistic partner Winston “Winne” Bergwijn as co-director. The play is written by Smita James, Véronique Efomi and Munganyende, and the music is composed by the Aruban writer and composer Michael Lampe.

The creative team behind KINGS…come home is particularly significant because it includes makers with Aruban and Curaçaoan roots. For these artists, presenting the work in Aruba carries a special resonance. The performance itself reflects on departure, discovery, community and return — themes deeply connected to the histories and experiences of Caribbean migration and diaspora.

KINGS…come home tells the story of a family that decides to leave their home, navigating through time as a labyrinth in search of a world that preceded them. Through this journey, the performance explores the human desire for connection amidst the rapid changes of our world and the long-term echoes of history.

As their journey unfolds, the characters reconnect with their origins, where the whispers of ancestors merge with the voices of descendants. Carefully navigating the line between the familiar and the unknown, they uncover hidden patterns and a deep longing for love, hope and human connection.

This moving performance sheds light on both the past and the present, exploring the enduring search for community in a constantly changing world. KINGS…come home reflects on how we come to terms with our past while searching for healing and a place to call home in the future.

The production is an initiative of KIP Republic and will be presented in Aruba in collaboration with Cas di Cultura, the national theater of the island. The project is made possible in part by the National Commemoration Fund for the History of Slavery.

The performance is presented in multiple languages — Papiamento, English, Dutch, Tigrinya and Kikongo — with each performer speaking in their own mother tongue.

SABA, the island’s leading provider of elderly care, is pulling back the curtain to offer the public an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at their facilities. On Sunday, March 22, 2026, SABA invites the community to experience the heart of their operations at Verpleeghuis Oranjestad (VO).

Located at Caya Ing. Roland H. Laclé 5, the event will run from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, providing an interactive look at how SABA cares for our island’s cherished elderly.

Beyond the doors: An interactive experience

SABA’s Open House is a community-wide invitation to see the daily life and the care provided.

“Caring Beyond Care means creating a true sense of home for every resident we serve. By opening our doors, we show proudly what ‘Hunto mas fuerte’ truly looks like in action,” says Sulima Geerman, Director of SABA.

A partnership for prevention: SABA & Fundacion ABO

In honor of International Colorectal Cancer Awareness month, SABA is proud to partner with Fundacion ABO during the event. As part of the CORESA program, the Open House will feature a dedicated station where eligible visitors (ages 45–75) can learn about the FIT-test, a simple, private screening test that starts at home.

“Screening doesn’t have to start at a hospital; it starts with a simple choice at home,” says Dr. Chris Franca, founder of the CORESA program. By hosting Fundacion ABO, SABA aims to show that proactive healthcare and elderly care go hand-in-hand.

Register for priority access

While walk-ins are welcome, registration is highly encouraged to ensure a personalized experience. Registered attendees will receive priority access to the scheduled tours and interactive sessions.

To secure your spot, please visit the SABA Aruba Facebook page for the registration link: www.facebook.com/saba.aruba

#END#

About SABA Aruba:

SABA is the cornerstone of elderly care in Aruba, dedicated to providing a dignified and comfortable care  for the island’s elderly.

Media Contact:

Omaily Lucas

omaily@the-lab.nu

+297 5660884

In December, a message on Facebook introduced Gasparito Aruban Estate, a brand-new event venue in the vibrant Noord district of Aruba. The historic estate is the perfect setting for weddings, corporate gatherings, and all kinds of special celebrations, the message continued, if you are ready to bring your event to life, we would be delighted to explore the possibilities with you. Contact us at bonbini@gasparito.com or call +297 739 9900

An avalanche of reservations followed from Christmas parties to birthdays and weddings. Jacky & Maarten, two tireless hospitality entrepreneurs were rewarded with instant recognition and appreciation of their newest venture, Gasparito Aruban Estate.

Back in 2016-2017, Dutch-born bartender, DJ, and sunshiny host, Maarten Thoonen, started operating a one stop party shop, The Little One, a red vintage VW he used to serve specialty cocktails and finger food from. He could park in anywhere. Festivities started as soon as he opened the hatch. We saw him and his fire-engine red VW at all corporate and private events on Aruba. Then the man had the good sense to marry Jacky Lopez, a talented, equally sunshiny local chef, and together they spun the Little One into an empire, adding Picnic Aruba along the way.

Nothing was too hard or too complicated, clients’ wishes were sacred, putting in 70 hours of work every week, became a norm.

Sometimes last year Jacky & Maarten decided to work smarter, not harder, and purchase the Gasparito Aruban Estate, in the heart of Noord. They fully restored the 219-year-old original cunucu house, built 1807, with the invaluable help of Maarten’s father, his sister too. They brought the inner courtyard, water well and rum shop bar, to life. Everything was restored to its original glory, and all artifacts preserved, the original property sign revived. Jacky designed a modern kitchen, storerooms, and staff areas, Maarten oversaw the creation of offices and a private enclave, behind the scenes, where he parked the couple’s Airstream residence. An iconic Aluminum travel trailer where they live with their nine-year-old cunucu dog!

Jacky & Maarten are not done yet, they are still adding finishing touches, but they are now open for functions up to 500 people, but equally love small, intimate events, such as rehearsal dinners, dance parties in the Starry Courtyard or a cocktail party at the Fountain Square.

With five distinct party areas, complete with a wheelchair access bathroom, Gasparito Aruban Estate packs in a lot of charm and authenticity. (The name Gasparito derives from the original landowner, Gaspar Ridderstap.)

A bit of history: The original Gasparito restaurant was open in the 90s, by three local business executives, hospitality pillars of our community, Oslin Toppenberg, at the time station manager of American Airlines, Joyce Bartels Daal and Gladys Croes, both freshly retired from the hotels. Joyce worked at the Divi Divi, Gladys at Divi Flamingo Beach in Bonaire. Their vision was to offer authentic Aruban food, in an art gallery setting to about 20 diners a night. The restaurant became known for its goat stew, keshi yena, pan bati, funchi, sopi di Jambo and other traditional dishes.

Jacky reports she visited Gladys, today co-owner of Vital Choices, in Paradera, and discussed all original recipes with her. Jacky intends to run a cooking school, during the day, teaching visitors about local food.

(Jacky found her way to Gladys by talking to local artist Elvis Tromp, whose small murals still decorate the old kitchen. He will be recreating and restoring his work from the 90s.)

Gasparito in the 90s, under management of a trio, was successful for a few years, then two partners moved on and it became a one woman show, with Gladys at the helm. A few years into that, the Barros family purchased the restaurant. Chef Danny Barros was in the kitchen while his father Raymond, a retire oil man, Barlock Caribbean Oil Corporation, distributors of Texaco Fuel and lubricants, managed the sports bar in the Fountain Square.

Then Danny married Rose, whose interest in agriculture overshadowed her interest in cooking, and they both transformed Gasparito into a farm, with multiple crops, a honeybee operation, and small farm animals, pigs, chickens – under the name Eco Living Aruba. They helped found United Farmer Aruba and Rose started running Living Soil Aruba, an Agro Consultancy, leading the Syntropic Agroforestry movement on the island.

Gasparito has always provided the opportunity to soak up Aruban culture in all its forms, and now more than ever with Jacky & Maarten, Aruban hospitality has just been raised by a few notches.

The Little One still offers beach weddings, but all post-ceremony festivities will be held at the lovely estate.

This week the Aruba Tourism Authority hosted a select group of media members and friends for the launch of ‘Mi Rason‘ at an exclusive film premiere at Gasparito Aruba Estate. It was the perfect venue for a memorable experience.

Dear Aruba,

I have loved you my entire life. I have loved you in the way only someone born on your soil can — not as a postcard, not as a vacation, not as a “one happy island” bumper sticker. I have loved you the way a mother loves: completely, desperately, and with the full knowledge of every flaw.

But today, Aruba, I am afraid of what you are becoming. And I am grieving what you are letting them take from you.

I watched my son grow up on your beaches. He played freely on shoreline that now belongs, in every practical sense, to people who will leave on Sunday and never think of you again. Our beaches are not fenced — they don’t need to be. The hotels plant their palapas and their security guards do the work, quietly shooing locals away from the water’s edge. And where the hotels haven’t reached, the Airbnb guests have claimed it for themselves — tents, coolers, litter, and an attitude that says: we are the ones feeding you, so step aside. On our own beach. On his beach.

He is going abroad to study soon. And I told him something that broke my own heart to say: prepare yourself to not come back. His island. The place where I sang him to sleep. The place he has known since his first breath. I told my own child — an educated child, raised in an educated family, because we are not a simple people, we never were — that his home may no longer have room for him.

What kind of island cannot house its own children?

Our young people cannot rent an apartment because every available home has become an Airbnb. They cannot buy because prices have been driven into a fantasy that only tourists and foreign investors can afford. The middle class — the backbone of any healthy society — is being quietly suffocated. I have a master’s degree. I bargain shop. I calculate. I worry at the end of the month. Not because I made wrong choices, but because the island’s economy has been reorganized around extracting money from visitors and delivering it to non-local entrepreneurs and investors, while the people who actually live here, who pay taxes here, who raise children here, are left to manage on the scraps. If someone with my education is feeling this, what does that say about everyone else?

And yet the hotels keep growing. And here is where the cruelty of the cycle reveals itself: Aruba has always been an island of immigrants. We know this. We are proud of this. People came from across the Caribbean, from Venezuela, from the Netherlands, from everywhere — and they built lives here, and they became us. That is who we are.

But Aruba is a small island. It ends, and then there is sea. There is no more land. And when the tourism machine grows beyond what our current population can service, it does not ask: how do we take care of the people already here? It simply imports more workers to fill the positions it needs — while doing nothing for the Arubans already struggling, already squeezed, already leaving. More people on a finite island with crumbling roads, overwhelmed hospitals, and a housing market that has lost its mind. Our healthcare system was not built for this scale. Our infrastructure was not built for this. And nobody in power seems to be doing the math.

Our roads were not built for this. Our reefs were not built for this. Our wildlife — the birds, the iguanas, the sea turtles who have nested on our shores long before the first tourist ever arrived — they were not built for this. Every year, more of them disappear. Every year, more of us disappear too, quietly, without ceremony, on a one-way flight off the island we were born on.

I have watched drunk visitors scream at locals on our beaches. I have watched them treat our people like props in their vacation fantasy — colorful, decorative, expected to smile. I have watched our politicians nod along, approve another hotel, another tower, another development that benefits foreign shareholders and leaves Arubans with crumbs and traffic.

And I have asked myself: who is this island for?

Tourism is not the enemy. I understand that. I am not naive. Our economy breathes through it. But there is a difference between an island that welcomes guests and an island that sells itself — piece by piece, beach by beach, neighborhood by neighborhood — until the people who belong to it are strangers in their own home.

We have crossed that line. We crossed it quietly, while we were all busy working, and now we look up and the island looks different. It feels different. It smells like sunscreen and profit and the kind of development that has no memory and no soul.

To the politicians who have let this happen: your children will inherit this too. Your grandchildren will ask you what you chose, when you had the chance to choose. Growth is not a legacy. A living, breathing community — with affordable homes, wild coastlines, dignified roads, and young people who actually stay — that is a legacy.

To my fellow Arubans: we have to stop being polite about this. Our silence is being mistaken for consent. Our hospitality is being mistaken for surrender. We can love our visitors and still demand that our home remain ours. These are not contradictions. They are the minimum.

My son will leave soon. He will study hard. He will build a life. And every time someone asks where he is from, I know his face will do something complicated — that mix of pride and heartbreak that every Aruban abroad carries like a second passport.

I want him to be able to come home. I want there to be something left to come home to.

That is all I am asking. Not to stop the world. Not to close the airport. Just to remember that an island is more than a destination. It is someone’s home. It is our home. And it is worth fighting for.

With love, grief, and a stubborn hope,

A Mother of Aruba