100 Years: Lago era ends in San Nicolas as Aruba turns to new uses for the site

SAN NICOLAS--After 100 years, Aruba will permanently close the Lago refinery in San Nicolas and redevelop the site. Prime Minister Mike Eman announced the decision on Saturday during a visit by Dutch outgoing Prime Minister Dick Schoof, calling it “a huge decision” that ends a long chapter in the island’s history. For decades the refinery shaped Aruba’s economy. Eman noted that its arrival in the 1920s marked a turning point and said the government intends to fully dismantle and repurpose the area.

Eman described remediation and site preparation as a major task for a small island and requested Dutch technical assistance, including support with cleanup and an international tender to guide redevelopment. Schoof praised the move, recognizing that many Arubans worked at the plant and that the choice carries emotional weight for the community. “Sustainability requires courageous decisions,” Schoof said.

The refinery’s legacy extends beyond Aruba. During the Second World War it supplied fuel to Allied forces, contributing to the liberation of Europe and the Netherlands. The Parliament of Aruba previously endorsed closure through the De Meza Motion. Government has framed the step as a moral and ecological shift, with plans to transform the area in the coming years into a hub for clean energy, maritime innovation, circular industry, housing, and culture. The Netherlands is processing the request for technical support.

Lago Oil & Transport Co. Ltd. began in 1924 as a shipping company moving crude from Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela to a transshipment facility in Aruba. The refinery, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, operated for decades before Exxon shut down and began dismantling the plant and the Lago Colony on March 31, 1985.

In the interwar years and through the 1940s, limited jobs on St. Maarten pushed many residents to seek steady work at the Lago refinery in Aruba, part of a broader oil-driven labor pull across the Dutch Caribbean. Contemporary reports and scholarship note targeted recruitment from the Windward islands, remittances that became central to household income back home, and even direct “importation of laborers” from St. Maarten for construction and refinery operations in San Nicolas.

By mid-century the scale was clear. In 1950 St. Maarten’s population was about 1,484, while 627 people identified as St. Maarteners were working in Aruba, evidence of how refinery employment reshaped livelihoods and mobility. San Nicolas developed into a multiethnic town anchored by refinery work, with strong English-Caribbean presence that included migrants from St. Maarten.

Large oil finds under Lake Maracaibo created a transport problem because the channel to the lake was too shallow for ocean tankers. The Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, which held a lease on much of the lake, formed Lago Petroleum Corporation to run lake tankers that ferried crude to Aruba. On August 14, 1924, Captain Robert Rodgers, an agent for Lago Petroleum, surveyed San Nicolas as a potential harbor. Expansion of the port and construction of an oil depot followed that year. While the depot was being built, crude was transshipped from vessels anchored off Oranjestad and sent to the United States for refining.

Construction of the Aruba refinery started on February 24, 1928. Early work prioritized housing for foreign workers and their families to support the buildout of the facility and the growing operations around San Nicolas.

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