Boutique Hotels in Pietermaai Worth the Splurge
Pietermaai, the narrow strip of Dutch-colonial townhouses just east of Punda, spent decades as Willemstad’s faded backstreet. Today its restored 18th- and 19th-century facades hold the island’s densest concentration of small design hotels, walkable to genuinely good restaurants and a waterfront that catches every sunset. The catch — and it’s an honest one — is that the coastline here is rocky limestone, not sand. You get ocean views, pool decks over the water, and the sound of the sea, but no beach outside your door. That trade-off is the whole argument for staying here: you trade daily beach access