Animals of Aruba and Curacao

When we travel we are always on the lookout for animals and scenery. Our trip to Aruba and Curacao was no exception. In the main image that's a Aruba Whiptail or Cododo - one of the prettiest lizards we have ever seen. They were hanging out by Turtle beach at the far north end of the island. It's aptly named since we saw most of the turtles in this blog there - Don't pay for an excursion, you can see them a couple dozen meters from the shore. Pelican's are common on both islands and there are flamingo lagoons, especially on Curacao.

We spent a lot of time swimming with the turtles, it was a short drive from our Airbnb in Noord and it's not everyday we get to swim with turtles, so we went there every day of our trip. Getting in the water is a little precarious as it involves steps carved into the rocks and a little bit of waves, but it's well worth it as there are dozens of turtles within an easy swim to the shore.

Turtles are our favourite sea creatures. There are some excellent diving lagoons around the island where you can see all sorts of wildlife but we didn't bring an underwater camera and for the most part it was an assortment of fish one could see throughout most of the Caribbean.

Aruba is a very developed island and you are never more than a couple hundred meters from a house. The turtles don't seem to mind and are more interested in the seagrass.

Flamingos are not that exciting. They were a hundred meters from the road near Sint Michiel on the island of Curacao. We stopped the car and watched them for a bit since seeing them in the wild is a checkmark.

Downtown Oranjestad is home to some friendly pelicans. It was incredibly hot out in the sun but these fishers never call it quits. At one of the beaches, Arashi, they were dive bombing fish as we swam around, without a single concern that there were dozens of people in the water.

Birds, lizards, fish and turtles are the most common species on these islands. We saw random large iguanas around the islands but our resort on Curacao happened to be an iguana sanctuary.

They would hang out on the sides of the natural pools at the Kontiki resort near Mambo beach. It was always so hot we would hang out in the pools but unlike the iguanas, we were in the shade.

Iguanas are large vegetarian lizards. Some of them were a few feet long. Most of them are afraid of humans, but some of the larger ones get aggressive if you go near them.

This rat was spotted in an alley of downtown Oranjestad.

The cat was on the resort near the restaurant. We saw a number of cats on our vacation, mostly near restaurants but I'm sure they snack on the odd lizard or bird.

On Aruba there is an Ostrich farm and a Donkey Sanctuary. We opted out of visiting the Ostrich farm, but went to the donkey sanctuary with a bag of apples. Admission is free and you can go into the donkey pen.

There are donkey sanctuaries on a few Caribbean islands we've been to and this was our first time visiting. Make sure to bring a lot of apples and carrots as they really enjoy the treat!

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the animals of Aruba and Curacao.

All photos taken with an s22 or iphone 15 pro

Blog on Curacao
Blog on Aruba