Talk:Curaçao

Duty Free Zone
Numerous web sites refer to a "harbor duty free zone", fenced-in, and offering products at wholesale and retail that are also tax free. Sales require proof buyer is visitor to island, and items are sent directly to departing ships or airport, not carried by buyer. Can anyone provide better details, e.g. on location, offerings?
 * "The Harbor Duty-Free Zone. This Free Zone is the largest in the Caribbean. It's patronized by retailers from throughout the region, who come to stock up on goods from all over the world. It's a distribution center for clothing, textiles, shoes, perfumes, pharmaceutical products and many other wholesale or retail sale goods with attractive duty-free prices. The Harbor Free Zone is a fenced-in area of 57 acres. The majority of companies established in the Harbor Free Zone are trading firms that distribute products from the United States, Europe and Asia to the Caribbean and Latin America. There is also tax-free shopping at the free zone. Goods purchased in the free zone must be shipped directly to your home or transferred to your ship or flight. You can pick them up when you arrive home." http://www.experiencecuracao.com/shopping/ (WT-en) TomNativenewYorker 15:54, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Beaches
I added a beaches sub-category with the names of two beaches as a start. There are numerous public beaches for addition as I get more time. (WT-en) TomNativenewYorker 09:40, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Specific listings
Since there seems to be a city article only for Willemstad, perhaps we need to reconcile ourselves to some listings of specific hotels, et al., that are in other parts of the island, thereby creating a hybrid city/region article. I think that's messy, but do you have another suggestion? Should "the rest of the island", by some name, be made into a region article with listings, so the listings can be moved out of this higher-level region article? Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:28, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * This will continue to be a perennial problem with small islands such as Ascension and other isolated territories that have many of the characteristics of countries.
 * A hybrid article will not seem messy to our readers - only to a few editors here that are more concerned with formality and precedent than readability and useful exposition.
 * I recommend moving the sparse content of Willemstad here (over a re-direct) into a hybrid; we can always re-consider the decision in the future if we should ever be startled by a flood of separate articles about other settlements in Curaçao... --W. Frankemailtalk 11:41, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, maybe merging Willemstad with this article is the best solution, after which all the "move to city" templates would be removed. But I'd like to get comments from others before doing a merge. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:53, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Correct.
 * Policy at Geographical hierarchy still states "Our hierarchies work best with a moderate number of items at each level; a good target is around seven items, plus or minus two" and while I don't agree wholeheartedly with this (except when trying to resist the inexorable tendency for lists of cities to grow unwieldy in larger areas), I very much doubt whether we would ever have enough material to make more than one article besides Willemstad and that article would inevitably seem strained and artificial. --W. Frankemailtalk 07:52, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to merge and redirect Willemstad to Curaçao
As you can see above, a proposal was made to do this merge/redirect. The reasoning is that there is but one city article, so we are left with a messy situation in which some listings are moved to the one city article and others, for businesses (hotels, etc.) in every other part of the island, are left here, along with jarring "move to city" templates that make for bad reading. The Willemstad article has a nice pagebanner, but the content is not so lengthy that it would harm the Curaçao article if it were merged into it.

What do you think, everyone? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:57, 16 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm fine with returning Willemstad's listings to the Curaçao article. However as the island seems to be 60-70 km from end to end I do think we should group the POIs in the sections using level 3 headings (how about Northwest, Central, Willemstad and Southeast?) for better overview and usability. ϒpsilon (talk) 15:40, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Just to make sure I understand: Your suggestion is to have all the listings in one article, but to group them in these subsections to help travelers, right? Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:13, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, something like e.g. Mombasa and Montevideo. ϒpsilon (talk) 17:30, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Understood. I don't know Curaçao well (never been there), but anyone who wants to get the ball rolling with that kind of setup has my support. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:50, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Seven years later
It looks like the merger was never completed, and the tags were never removed. The tags are completely pointless clutrer here, so I have removed them. Ground Zero (talk) 18:04, 24 October 2021 (UTC)