Initiated and developed by Jacob Gelt Dekker, the Museum Kurá Hulanda opened its door in April 1999. Museum Kurá Hulanda is situated right at the city-center harbor of Willemstad, where Dutch entrepreneurs once traded and transshipped enslaved Africans along with other “commercial goods.” This museum impressively exhibits the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in its totality, from slave capture in Africa through the Middle Passage and relocation in the New World. Museum Kurá Hulanda further exhibits a vast collection of artifacts from continental Africa, showing the dynamic vitality and great Empires of West Africa, which in the largest collection of African artifacts in the Caribbean. The museum has recently expanded its emphasis to include other non-Western Cultures of the world, and now hosts spectacular exhibitions of the fertile Crest Region in the Middle East, Pre-Columbian Gold of Colombia, Maroon cultures of Suriname, Africans in Brazil, Santeria/Voodoo, and much more. Museum Kurá Hulanda demonstrates that our African and diverse cultural heritage has influenced Curaçaoan and Caribbean societies until today..