Aruba, like neighboring Bonaire and Curaçao, was the home of the Arubaes - an Arawak tribe from the South American mainland. The first European to stumble upon Aruba was Alonso de Ojeda, a compatriot of Columbus, who claimed the island for Spain in 1499. The Spanish took little interest in Aruba, apart from shipping some of the Arawaks to work in mines on Hispaniola. Conflict in Europe between Spain and Holland resulted in the Dutch seizing the island in 1636, and the Dutch began to colonise Aruba at the end of the 17th century.

Poor soil and aridity saved the island from plantation economics and the slave trade. Instead the Dutch left the Arawaks to graze livestock on the parched landscape, using the island as a source of meat for other Dutch possessions in the Caribbean. The British arrived in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars but sailed into the sunset in 1816. Less than a decade later, the first of Aruba's three economic booms took place when gold was discovered near Balashi. A flood of gold-hungry immigrants arrived from Europe and Venezuela, and mining continued right up until 1916.

When the mines became unproductive, Aruba turned to oil refining in a big way. In 1929 the world's largest refinery was built on the southeastern tip of the island. Things hummed along quite swimmingly until the 1940s, when Aruba began to resent playing second fiddle to Curaçao in the federation known as the Netherlands Antilles (then composed of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao and Suriname). Aruban calls for autonomy became increasingly strident over the next 40 years, and in 1986 Aruba finally got its way and became an autonomous state within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The new level of independence came close on the heels of a severe economic downturn, prompted largely by the closure of Aruba's oil refinery. Having exhausted the real gold and refined the black gold, the Arubians turned to tourism to bankroll their future. Despite the economic autonomy enabled by the tourist boom, plans for full independence in 1996 were shelved.