Cas Veneranda, at Wilhelminastraat 7, Oranjestad, has been restored beautifully and welcomed tenants, the Department of Economic Affairs, Commerce and Industry, DEACI, and a restaurant operator, Nathaly de Mey, of Taste my Aruba.

Last week, Nathaly gathered a few of her friends and gave them a taste of her Mesa Secreta, one of the three food concept she is developing for the venerated location. Mesa Secreta is a table for twelve, perfectly set with fine linen, embroidered napkins, flowers and candles designed to feed a group of friends deliciously. On the occasion of the first Mesa Secreta Nathaly recreated a family recipe for Keshi Yena, followed by an award-winning pumpkin soup, a lovely fresh salad, sliced sirloin steak on a bed of avocado and a corn tortilla for main course, and a sinful chocolate mousse for dessert.

Chef Janos, a tall Dutchman who worked in Bonaire for more than a decade doubled as the knowledgeable sommelier, while Nathaly introduced the cuisine.

She also introduced her new puppy, a playful black lab by the name of Pricilla.

Mesa Secreta will be available once a while, in an air-conditioned dining room with an exhibition kitchen, while the terrace streetside will serve breakfast and lunch every day. The roof top terrace will open in the evening, for small bites and cocktails, al fresco.

Wilhelminastraat is making a comeback.

The street is one of the historically important streets of Oranjestad, and the building is part of the older residential/architectural fabric being slowly restored as downtown seeks revitalization.

I remember the building as home to the elegant Papiamento restaurant. My memory shows me walking up a regal staircase, stepping onto a polished wooden floor. It’s not really a memory, it is an image, a fragment, a frame, which was replaced by many years on abandon, as the architectural gem fell into disrepair.

I found some info online: Cas Veneranda, was built in 1936. It was commissioned by Federico Maximiliano “Machi” Arends (1901–1981) for his wife Maria Veneranda Laclé (1901–1985). It is now a protected monument and is owned by Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba.

The romantic story behind the architecture is genuine: while traveling in Cartagena, Colombia, Maria Veneranda became fascinated by a grand house there. Machi commissioned the master builder Nicolaas “Dada” Picus to go to Cartagena, study the building and bring the design back to Aruba. Picus then reproduced its character in Oranjestad. Colombian wood was imported specifically for the floors, doors, and frames.

The resulting building was one of the largest and most luxurious houses in Aruba at the time, in a Latin American neo-Baroque style. It even had a rose garden.

Maria Veneranda wasn’t simply the wife of a wealthy Aruban businessman. She was herself from one of the prominent families of early-20th-century Aruba.

Her father was Adriaan Laclé (1866–1935), a wealthy trader, landowner and financier described in historical accounts as one of Aruba’s richest men of his generation. He helped people obtain loans and owned considerable property. He commissioned Quinta Del Carmen in Bubali, one of the island’s few historic estates.

Adriaan had 17 children, although only 11 reportedly survived beyond age 18. Two of his daughters became particularly prominent:

Maria Monica Laclé married Dr. Eloy Arends

Maria Veneranda Laclé married Machi Arends

And here is the remarkable coincidence: the two Arends brothers married the two Laclé sisters.

So the two magnificent houses standing opposite each other on Wilhelminastraat were essentially two sister-and-brother couples’ mansions.

Eloy and Maria Monica’s house became the building now used as Oranjestad’s Town Hall. Machi and Maria Veneranda’s became Cas Veneranda.

That gives this little section of Wilhelminastraat extraordinary significance in Aruba’s social history.

Because Machi was a merchant and Spain’s consul in Aruba, Cas Veneranda served as his residence and part of the building also functioned as the Spanish Consulate. Machi went on to take part in Aruba’s organized business community, at the Chamber of Commerce, as the representative of the retail sector.

After the Arends family period, the building went through a succession of very different uses, it was a flower shop, an ice-cream shop, a nightclub, and as I remembered Papiamento Restaurant.

Papiamento Restaurant opened there in 1978. During the restaurant’s final years, the building also ran at night as Club Nouveau. Papiamento eventually moved out around 1990, after which the building was largely abandoned.

The Monuments Fund website explains that the large staircase was added during the restaurant period that was not part of the original house.

As the house was recently restored, the restoration team removed later additions in an attempt to recover the original architecture.

I also remember, in 2014, a major fire destroyed the roof and a large amount of the original interior, including valuable Colombian wood floors, doors and window frames, and many years thereafter the Arends heirs and the Monuments Fund, negotiated to reach an agreement to salvage the property. After more than seven years of negotiations, the Arends family agreed to sell the property to the Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba (SMFA). The formal transfer took place in 2024.

The building was handed over, restored, in April, this year.

The restoration was a group effort, a heritage project shared by Stichting Monumentenfonds Aruba, the Arends family, Government of Aruba, APFA — General Pension Fund Aruba, Nationaal Restauratiefonds of the Netherlands and the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Merêre Bistro, at Elleboogstraat 9, is an exciting, new, lunch & dinner spot in Oranjestad. The eatery made its debut in honor of Press Day, when it hosted the local media for a rich yet healthy breakfast.

The initiative of Susanita La Bella deserves compliments for delighting members of the media, avid breakfast-eaters, guests of the Aruba Tourism Authority.

Susanita’s first project was the Aruba Experience Café, in 2018, on Emanstraat #37. The café, a remodeled Cunucu House, a classic Aruban country home, was totally invisible before restoration. It was populated by dozens of tenants and falling apart. Susanita, a former magazine publisher found her calling in construction and hospitality, breathing new life into the charming location, today, one of the most popular breakfast & lunch spots in town.

Her second project, a three-story building almost across the street from the Aruba Experience Cafe, is a beauty with magnificent city views. The building is located on the other side of the Central Boutique Hotel parking lot, behind the former Mango.

The ground floor is home to Merêre Bistro, the second floor is a meeting venue, Susanita named it Salon A Bo So, while the third floor with magnificent Oranjestad roof tops in full view, received the name Ambiance.

Susanita announced the restoration of the building in 2021. She endured 13 court cases from neighbors who were not happy about the extent of development. She worked from a sketch, following the design in her head, building 110 square meters, employing 63 workers, ordering the steel, tile, and concrete herself, as project manager.

Most importantly, she survived bureaucracy and ill-wishing opposition and stuck to her vision of a multi-purpose facility, which could be rented out for weddings, parties, and political gatherings. The building’s third floor veranda, Ambiance, overlooking the plaza evokes feelings of urban grandeur. The veranda may serve any iconic moment, especially weddings!!

Incidentally, the building is pink with royal blue trim, flaunting flowering potted bougainvillea.

What is next, I asked.

Susanita already identified a rundown building, which she is determined to save from neglect and abandon on Emanstraat.

It’s the love of Aruba that drives her, she shares, she loves breathing new life into Rancho, it’s her legacy.

Susanita introduced me to the mentor chef she imported from Costa Rica to teach her local EPB graduates selected to work in her kitchen everything he knows about ancestral food. Chef Pablo Bonilla, a research consultant, chef, restaurateur owner, and culinary anthropologist researched the food heritage of the Chibcha, an indigenous people who lived mainly in the highlands of what is today central Colombia, many centuries before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century.

The Chibcha had a surprisingly sophisticated food culture, the Chef explains, and Merêre Bistro is diving into that. The Chibcha were skilled hunters and fishermen, they grew corn, potatoes, beans, quinoa, cassava/yuca and aji successfully. They roasted, boiled, baked and smoked food. One technique that became famous after European contact was barbacoa—slow-cooking meat over a raised wooden framework above a fire. So when you hear the modern word “barbecue,” you’re hearing a word with an Indigenous Caribbean origin.

Why Merêre Bistro, I asked, what is the origin of the name.

Susanita answered immediately: From the Latin meritum, merit, worth, recognition, to deserve, to earn, respect to the creation. MERÊRE is a place where Aruba’s culture and traditions are given the recognition they deserve, turning every experience into an act of memory and gratitude because this is Aruba within Aruba.

In honor of the upcoming press day, September 1st, the Aruba Tourism Authority offered a delicious breakfast followed by an extensive presentation to local press members – we showed up in full force!

The venue, Merêre Bistro, in the heart of Oranjestad, the initiative of Susanita La Bella, deserves compliments for delighting breakfast-eaters with a rich yet healthy spread.

First up CEO Ronella Croes, under the heading Conecta cu ATA. She reviewed industry results, noting that strong results are not automatic. Kudos to ATA, you have been a leader in Caribbean marketing for decades.

Croes then reviewed the evolution of her organization from a marketing body to a Destination Marketing and Management Organization and finally the present-day Tourism 4.0, the on-going transition to a regenerative guest economy.

What does it mean?

It means that in the early days for Tourism 1.0, from 1958 to 1985, Aruba laid the foundation to its tourism economy, supporting the primary economic pillar at the time, the refinery.

For Tourism 2.0, from 1986 to 2017, ATA worked full speed to grow the industry as the island’s core business, with the demise of the refinery.

For Tourism 3.0, from 2017 – to 2024, the organization pivoted to court a high-value, low-impact guest profile. We started talking about carrying capacity at the time, and a slogan promoting Aruba as a Dushi place to live, not just visit, emerged. ATA also diverted its attention and considerable funds to the management of our tourist product.

Today, it is actively involved in over 80 initiatives from beautification to preservation and conservation, cultural awareness, culinary excellence, youth activities, Art, Carnival, Sport and social responsibility.

For the current Tourism 4.0, ATA is considering the impact of heated tourism on the island and its quality of life. It is working on the transition to a regenerative guest economy that stars a more respectful guest who is informed, who cares about the environment and the locals, who applies less pressure on our infrastructure, who enjoys Aruba responsibly, who buys local, safeguards nature and is interested in our culture. That of course also applies to the locals who share the benefits from tourism, they too must be more respectful and cautious, when it comes to our precious few resources.

The ATA is taking the leading role in educating the public, both local and visiting.

Taking parts in the presentation several other ATA team members among them Gemey Zara, PR & Corporate Communications Specialist and Patrick Melchiors, Destination Service Manager.

There was no Q&A session.

I decided to be optimistic. The Galapagos islands managed to educate the world that they are globally important for their unique biodiversity, role in evolutionary science, and critical conservation value.

Why not Aruba?

Of course ATA’s course of action depends on the Minister of Tourism’s views and values, his political agenda, and his political courage. The former minister of tourism agreed in meetings to pivot and use different metrics to measure tourism success, but once in public only bragged about arrivals, as the measure for economic achievement.

The current Minister of Tourism, is the first one to express openly the need to pivot, change direction. He declared he aims at a shift, where VALUE would be the organizing principle, across the board, for visitors and locals. He also reiterated that well being of the island and its residents was most important in the long term.

We agree. Let’s see.

The 2026 Aruba Vacation Ownership Longitudinal Report presents vacation ownership as one of the foundations of Aruba’s tourism economy, rather than simply another accommodation segment. Commissioned by the Aruba Timeshare Association (ATSA) and Aruba Tourism Authority (ATA) and prepared by the University of Aruba, the study is based on 1,481 completed surveys collected between November 2025 and January 2026. It is the third comparable study, following research conducted in 2008 and 2017, allowing Aruba to identify long-term changes in its vacation ownership market.

The sector today consists of approximately 16 resorts and 3,500 units, representing more than US$2 billion in cumulative capital investment and an estimated US$750 million in annual direct and indirect economic activity. The report argues that its real value goes beyond accommodation: owners generate spending for restaurants, retail, transportation, recreation, attractions, and other local businesses, while their repeat visits provide unusually predictable tourism demand.

The most striking characteristic is loyalty. The average owner is 66.6 years old; 79.4% have visited Aruba more than ten times, and 94.5% intend to return within two years. An extraordinary 95.5% would recommend Aruba to others, while 87.1% report being very or extremely satisfied with their current vacation experience.

There has also been a fundamental shift in why people own timeshare in Aruba. The destination itself has become more important than the ownership product. 95.9% use their ownership for personal vacations, compared with only 0.7% using exchanges. In 2008, personal use was 77.8% and exchange use 11.5%. This demonstrates that owners increasingly regard Aruba as their “home” destination rather than simply a convenient location within an international exchange network.

Owners also stay longer—an average 13.7 nights—and spend substantially on the island. Average on-island expenditure reached approximately US$2,100 per person, 48% higher than in 2017. Restaurants are the largest beneficiary, followed by accommodation, car rentals, shopping, gambling, groceries, and recreation.

The report’s central warning is demographic. The owner base is aging and highly mature, which reflects exceptional retention but creates a need to attract younger generations. At the same time, Aruba has limited room for large-scale inventory expansion. The future therefore depends less on building more units and more on preserving destination quality, strengthening loyalty, improving sustainability and safety, and creating flexible ownership products for younger buyers.

Ultimately, the report’s message is clear: Aruba competes on relationships, not volume. Its greatest vacation-ownership asset is not the number of rooms, but decades of emotional attachment between owners and the island. Protecting Aruba’s environment, cleanliness, safety, hospitality and overall quality is therefore essential not only to timeshare, but to the resilience and competitiveness of Aruba’s tourism economy.

Chef Urvin Croes launched his 16th menu at INFINI, in July. It was conceived as a journey through the cultures, traditions and ingredients that shaped the Caribbean, rather than simply being a collection of modernized Aruban dishes.

When Infini opened in 2020, Chef Croes wanted freedom from being defined by a particular cuisine or geographic tradition. The restaurant’s name stands for that philosophy, granting infinite possibility with umami, deliciousness derived from combined ingredients, in unconventional ways, as the common denominator.

For menu XVI, Chef Croes threaded together 12 dishes, one by one, personally explaining the historical Caribbean connection behind each name and ingredient, to his diner, at his stylish studio restaurant at Blue Condominium.

This is the chef’s most story-telling menu to date, as he is setting history at the heart of each dish. Each carefully assembled and plated course is a chapter in the saga of our multi-cultural island, coming alive with contemporary techniques reinterpreting Caribbean food traditions.

The menu takes off with Limpia Man, a ritualistic Hibiscus cleansing oil, as the introduction to the experience. It is organic and made on the island- its fragrance inspires calm and anticipation.

Chef Croes always introduces a young an ambitious kitchen team, a knowledgeable sommelier, and his group of diners, to each other.

Batata, the first appetizer stars sweet potato, in THREE different presentations in combination with tuna, coconut, jerk spices, onion, pineapple, mango and mustard. The marriage of sweet potato, and tropical fruit meets tuna and jerk seasoning, introducing the idea that ingredients move between cultures, continents, and timelines.

A story precedes every dishes. Chef Croes talks about the heritage of the Taíno, one of the indigenous populations of Aruba. He explains the meaningful connection between the Indigenous cultures of Venezuela, Aruba, Curaçao, and the other Caribbean islands, with batata, among the tropical staples on the island.

For Kachá & Bada, the chef forges a partnership with bread sommelier Zaida Everon of T2Pan, who bakes a special chocolate sourdough for Infini, made of quality regional cacao beans. The artisanal butter is made with tomato, cilantro, avocado. The name of the dish evokes African food traditions, while the chocolate sourdough is a contemporary intervention.

For Ikpiki, Amberjack, honeydew, jalapeño, lemon, and bay leaves, delivered a seafood course built around a combination of tropical freshness, acidity and aromatic herbs. It ranked high among my favorites.

Jambo, one of the most traditional Aruban dishes, predating European arrival by thousands of years, took part in a seafood medley, sharing the dish with delicate Turbot, shrimp, mussels, cilantro, a touch of heat with famed Madame Jeanette pepper, celery, and green grape. This presentation sits at the intersection of Caribbean and European food traditions. Chef Croes explained how food travelled through migration, colonization, trade, slavery, cultural exchange, and adaptation, to arrive in Aruba, in the 21st century.

The Limpia Paladar, delivered a Mojito bonbon, in a most unusual presentation, placed on the thumb joint, with instructions to just gulp it down. It was delicious, reminiscent of a rich, creamy chocolate bonbon.

Next, Keshi Yena, an interpretation of the most-loved Aruban dish of shredded pork and chicken, aged Gouda, green olives, raisins, and capers. Chef Croes explained that the origin of the dish is Colonial, as slaves used the discarded hollowed Dutch cheese rind as a receptacle, stuffing it with kitchen leftovers and whatever condiments they found, to make a baked savory meal. I did not know the story, and it makes perfect sense.  This dish has the greatest immediate significance for Aruba, it is iconic, and appears on many menus here, in different versions. At Infini, Chef Croes turned it into a fine dining expression.

In Merchants and Mangroves the chef combines Sirloin, harissa, Creole spices, black-eyed peas, bok choy, za’atar, vanilla and dukkah, a true East and West centerpiece. The chef explains that this dish stands for the movement of people across islands and continents, the exchange of commodities, and spices through the Caribbean, and around the globe.

Mosaic transitions the menu from savory to sweet.  It deliberately confuses the boundaries between the two by serving bread pudding, pecorino, king oyster mushroom, coffee, verjus, a raisin juice, pear and soy.

Carnival, the dessert, is a painting on a plate, made with corn cake, rum, soursop, chocolate, mandarin, tamarind, lime, and basil. It’s a big dessert statement, fusing the whole Caribbean pantry, and the name Carnival is very appropriate, loaded with cultural meaning.

Cos Dushi, dainty macaroon, filled with ponche crema, rum and passion fruit, almost concludes the evening.

The evening wraps up with Infini’s now-signature Bahama Mama Cupcake, which is served as the farewell gift at the end of the experience, in the spirit of Caribbean hospitality, guests always leave with a takeout bag.

The restaurant describes the menu as “Celebrating Caribbean flavor while pushing the boundaries of modern fine dining.” I totally agree.

A distinctive wine pairing is an option, complimenting the culinary sensation, it spans the globe and includes some excellent wine makers: Cava, Bonard, Brut, Spanish sparkling wine, as a welcome flute, then Billecart Salmon, a premium French Champagne; Marc Bred. Vouvray, France; Elena Walch, Sauvignon, Italy; Achaval Ferrer, Syrah, Argentina; Amarone, Della Valpolicella, Italy; Gonzalez Byass, Solera, Spanish Sherry and a repeat choice of Infini’s sommeliers Oremus, Tokaii, Late Harvest, Hungary.

Chef Croes gives credit to local growers and producers Farm a Cure Fungi, Petite Greens, Ceramics by Rani, Happyponics Aruba, T2Pan, LOVEmade, Smokey Bills, Mr. Webo, Nonna’s Gourmet and Hot Delight Pica di Papaya.

Under Chef Croes’ leadership, Infini is just one of three successful food concepts making guests happy. They are Infini at Blue Condominium, and Poke Ono, with two distinct locations, one at Azul condominium and the other at Renaissance Marketplace. The most recent addition is Caya House on Palm Beach.

Infini, into its seventh year of success, launches a different tasting menu every six months. It should be noted that Chef Croes is a tireless mentor, and the young cooks apprenticing in his kitchen are enjoying careers in various local restaurants thanks to the good methodology and work habits instilled by him in his own kitchens. Infini’s chef’s table dining experience is limited to just 18 guests. Book your culinary journey with Infini by calling:

+1-305-420-6432 (USA)

+297-280-8869 or +297-699-3982 (Aruba)

Or send an email to reservations@infiniaruba.com