Damacor – Rais.cw

Through the asphalting of roads and overpopulation in the city and Scharloo, the "move to the outside" got under way around 1940, and well-to-do people moved to new residential neighbourhoods such as those near Zeelandia, Damacor, Van Engelen, Cas Cora and Mahaai.

Damacor is a residential neighbourhood south-east of "Tra'i Seru" and west of Cas Cora. According to the author Father P. Brenneker, the name Damacor is a contraction of Damasó and Corrie, two small plantations that in the 18th century were owned by Mr Damasco van Ries and the Frenchman Dominique Cori respectively.

Other sources mention that the name arose later, referring to the three Jewish landowners Da Costa Gomez, Maduro and Corea, the first letters of whose surnames form the name Damacor.

Damasco van Ries

Father Nooyen tells of a certain Damasco van Ries who in 1799 had obtained a mortgage loan from the Santa Anna Church. This was for the benefit of his mother, who was the owner of the knoekje (small estate) Vreugdendal (part of the present Damacor), where four enslaved people were put to work.

Van Ries himself had sheep on the plantation Groot Kwartier, which was then owned by the Englishman Philips. In 1804 this plantation was the battleground between the Curaçaoan Manuel Piar and the English troops who had invaded the island. As a result Van Ries lost all his sheep. In 1805, when the English invaded again, he had to face them at Ascencion in his capacity as an officer of the citizens' militia.

Damasco was married to Joanna Catharina Steegman. In 1806 they baptised their daughter Ana Maria van Ries and in 1799 their second child, Paulina Elisabeth van Ries.

Damasco's name has in any case, albeit corrupted, gone down in history as Damasó.

Part of Rooi Catootje

In 1860 the estate came into the hands of Salomon Emanuel "Manchi" Levy Maduro, owner of the adjoining plantation Rooi Catootje. Besides Damasó (alias Vreugdendal), around that time Manchi had also bought other adjoining parcels such as plantation Princenhof (alias Djanoramarti), Francia and Corrie, and added them to Rooi Catootje.

Like Damasó, Djanoramarti and Cori are also names of the former landowners. Djanoramarti, Djanora Marta or Djanora Martis (1826) had a stone dwelling in the 19th century which was demolished when it was added to Rooi Catootje. The former grounds of Djanoramarti lie on the location of the present Protestant Marnix VSBO on the Cas Coraweg and the hill behind it.

Dominique Cori

The Frenchman Dominique Cori is mentioned in 1746 as a slave owner in the baptism registers of the Catholic church. The small plantation, which must have been located near the present Snip- and Corrieweg, was not really profitable and, because of the high mortgage debt, had to pay little land tax in 1828. It was also forced to be sold privately twice in 1832. In 1860 Corrie was incorporated into Rooi Catootje.

The lands of Damasó had already been incorporated with Corrie before that, as the archives of the Dankmeijer-Maduro family, owners of Rooi Catootje, show; they state the following: Corrie (Vreugdendal, 1761–1922) including the garden Damasó or Vreugdendal (1799–1922).

For the laying of pipelines to Caracas Bay, Shell bought a strip of the plantations Corrie and Damasó.

The Snip- and Corrieweg

Around 1950 the Koninklijke Nederlandse Scheepvaart Maatschappij (KNSM, Royal Netherlands Steamship Company) and the KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) had staff housing built at Damacor. This project is said to have been realised on the lands belonging to three local Jewish businessmen, as mentioned earlier.

De Snip ("The Snipe") was the first small aircraft of the KLM that flew from Schiphol to Curaçao, on 15 December 1934. Arrival on Curaçao was on 22 December 1934; it became the famous Christmas flight and marked the first trans-Atlantic flight of a KLM aircraft to the Caribbean. The aircraft was a Fokker F.XVIII with registration PH-AIS, nicknamed De Snip. The restored aircraft stands at the Curaçao Museum.

The name Cori still lives on in the Corrieweg, which is the extension of the Snipweg and forms the border between the bario Tra'i Seru on the one hand and the former Shell houses of Cas Cora on the other.

In the bend of the Corrieweg, next to the institute for the blind, lies Hòfi Corrie of the Joubert family. On the leasehold plot with an area of 9,000 square metres there are various fruit trees, four wells, and various birds and animals are also kept here, such as quail, pheasants, parakeets (prikichi), and also goats and horses.

Soledad

West of Damacor, in the area between the Snipweg at the level of Baker Tilly, the Development Bank on the Schottegatweg and south of the Damacorweg, lies the small neighbourhood Soledad, also called Soledá (= loneliness). On the Seru di Soledad a water tank used to stand.