Eating Iguana Stew in Curaçao’s Oldest Neighborhoods

The iguana arrives at the kitchen of Jeannette Martina already cleaned and jointed, the pieces bearing a family resemblance to chicken in their structure but nothing else. The skin has been removed, the tail sectioned, the legs separated at the joint. What remains is pale, lean meat on small bones, smelling faintly of the dry thorn scrub of the Curaçaoan interior — a landscape of cacti and wild oregano and the low, twisted trees called divi-divi that bend permanently westward in the trade winds.

Jeannette has been cooking iguana since her grandmother taught her, which was, by her estimate, sometime in the early 1970s. She lives and cooks in the Otrobanda district of Willemstad, on the western bank of the Sint Annabaai, in a narrow house with a kitchen that gives onto an inner courtyard where a yellow cat sleeps on a plastic chair. The kitchen is small and extremely well-organized, every surface serving a specific purpose, the spice shelf above the counter arranged in an order that appears random to outsiders and is clearly not.

Iguana is one of Curaçao’s oldest animal protein sources, consumed on the island since the era of the Arawak people who inhabited it before European contact in the fifteenth century. The green iguana — Iguana iguana — is abundant in the scrublands of Curaçao’s interior and the rocky coastal areas, and it has been hunted sustainably here for centuries, long enough to be woven into the local food culture in ways that have survived the introduction of imported meat, changing tastes, and the occasional disapproval of tourists who encounter the dish without context.

“In Europe they eat rabbit,” Jeannette says, arranging the iguana pieces in a heavy pot. “In Asia they eat snake. Here we eat iguana. This is our animal.”

Her preparation begins with a marinade of sour orange juice — the same bitter variety used across the Caribbean — garlic, and a blend of dried herbs that includes thyme, wild oregano, and a plant called kadushi, the fruit of the columnar cactus that grows across the island. The marinade pulls the faint gaminess from the meat and replaces it with a herbal brightness that reads as distinctly Curaçaoan — an aromatic profile you could not replicate with ingredients sourced elsewhere.

The stew builds slowly. Onions and tomatoes go in first, softened in oil. The marinated iguana pieces follow, browned on each side, then covered with water and left to simmer for an hour. The meat on iguana bones requires patience — it is attached differently than chicken, clinging to surfaces that seem initially inaccessible. But it yields to long cooking, pulling away in soft, succulent strands that absorb the stew’s liquid as they release from the bone.

The flavor is genuinely difficult to locate on a map of existing references. It is white meat in character — mild, fine-grained, without the mineral intensity of red meat — but with a richness that chicken doesn’t have, possibly from the fat distributed through the tail meat. The herbs and sour orange give it a Caribbean inflection that is specific enough to identify but not so strong that it overwhelms. It is, in the end, simply good: a satisfying protein in a well-made stew, distinguished primarily by the fact that eating it requires a brief recalibration of what one considers ordinary.

Jeannette serves it over rice cooked with salt and a touch of annatto — the seed that gives Caribbean rice its characteristic yellow — with a side of funchi, the cornmeal porridge that is the indigenous starch of the ABC islands, pressed into a smooth cake and sliced. The combination is filling without being heavy, the iguana stew’s acidity preventing the richness from accumulating.

In the Otrobanda market, two streets away, iguana is sold openly alongside chicken and fish at the covered stalls near the waterfront. The vendors know their regular customers, who arrive specifically for iguana, and the transaction is conducted with the same normalcy as any other protein purchase. There is no theater around it, no acknowledgment of its novelty value to outsiders. It is simply meat.

This normalcy is itself a kind of cultural argument. The framing of iguana as “exotic” or “brave” eating belongs to the perspective of the outsider. Within the culinary logic of Curaçao, eating iguana is not adventurous. It is ancestral. It is what this particular patch of Caribbean landscape has offered its inhabitants for as long as there have been inhabitants to receive it.

Jeannette finishes the stew and serves two portions, one for each of us, in ceramic bowls that she sets on the courtyard table outside. The yellow cat wakes up, assesses the situation, and returns to sleep. The trade winds move through the courtyard, carrying the smell of the sea from the harbor.

The meat comes off the bone with a gentle pull. The funchi is smooth and yielding. The rice is fragrant with annatto. Everything on the table was made in this kitchen, from ingredients sourced from this island, according to a method transmitted across generations without a single written word.

It is, by any reasonable definition, a perfect lunch.

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