Museum Kurá Hulanda

Fostering ongoing cultural conversations, community involvement, and scholarly research. Museum Kura Hulanda
Curaçao

Where the past looks over our shoulder

The forced relocation of Africans from Africa to the Americas and Caribbean by Europeans in the 17th to 19th Centuries changed the face of the world forever. Museum Kurá Hulanda is situated right at the city-center harbor of Willemstad, where

Dutch entrepreneurs once traded and transshipped enslaved Africans along with other “commercial goods”. This museum impressively exhibits the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in its totally, from slave capture in Africa through the Middle Passage and relocation in the New World. Museum Kurá Hulanda further exhibits a vast collection of artifacts from continental Africa, showing the dynamic vitality and great Empires of West Africa, which in the largest collection of African artifacts in the Caribbean. Our museum has recently expanded its emphasis to include other non-Western Cultures of the world, and now hosts spectacular exhibitions of the fertile Crest Region in the Middle East, Pre-Columbian Gold of Colombia, Maroon cultures of Suriname, Africans in Brazil, Santeria/Voodoo, and much more. Museum Kurá Hulanda demonstrates that our African and diverse cultural heritage has influenced Curaçaoan and Caribbean societies until today. Initiated and developed by Jacob Gelt Dekker, The Museum Kurá Hulanda opened its door in April 1999. A museum of the History of Mankind.