The Eagle Refinery was established by the Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1920’s. It stood where now Tamarijn and Divi Resorts, Divi Links, the Alhambra Casino and the H.E. Oduber Hospital are located. The Eagle Refinery got its name being an affiliate of the Mexican Shell refinery. It was called El Aguila (The Eagle). Aruba, at the time under Dutch rule, knew the refinery by its Dutch name ‘Arend Petroleum Maatschappij’, Arend being English for Eagle.

The Eagle concession stretched from the Eagle Colony, a compound where the foreign managers and their families lived, to Quinta del Carmen, a manor house where doctors and nurses lived. Behind Quinta del Carmen a small hospital was built for the Eagle refinery’s patients. There also was an 8-hole (!) golf course. The refinery compound ran from the Main Office building to the main pier, next to the tank farm. The giant F-shaped main pier lay in the choppy waters at Punta Brabo (‘rough point’)

Half way between Aruba’s capital city of Oranjestad and the refinery, the Eagle Colony neighborhood was built for the managers and their families, most of them Dutch or English. In this – very un-Aruban – square grid of streets, wooden houses, painted white with green roofs, stood out in the barren landscape where there were few other buildings. This community was a compound, guarded with a fence and had patrolled entrance gates. It featured a social center, the Eagle Club, with tennis courts and a swimming pool across the street. Bachelors quarters were constructed close to this club.

The Eagle Camp, as it was sometimes called, had its own water supply, but each house had two cisterns to collect rain water. In between the homes, maids quarters and washing facilities were built. The homes of the top officials were made out of concrete and had private maids quarters. Since a military conflict of global dimensions was looming, bomb shelters were dug out under some of the houses. They never needed to be used.

After the end of WW II, when the refinery was shut down, the gates and fences around the compound were taken down and local people moved into the houses. The neighborhood integrated gradually inside the Oranjestad city limits and the streets were named Engelandstraat, Schotlandstraat and Ierlandstraat. The former Eagle colony is now known as The Eagle.

The house at Engelandstraat 16 is the one best preserved, with its original walls composed of overlapping planks.