History

The first population was the Arawaks from the South of America migrated about a thousand years ago. They live peacefully in the island named at that moment the ‘Land of Salt’ until the arrival of the Amazonian Group, the Carib.
But it turned to the Spanish hands with the Christophe Colomb’s arrival on November 11th, 1493. He claimed the same day for Spain and Sint Maarten was forgotten because of conquests until 1620 when Dutch settlers were extracting salt from Sint Maarten’s pond to export it to Netherlands. Finally, the Island’s commercial possibilities attracted the Spanish in 1633 who built a Fort to assert their authority. In 1644, a Dutch fleet under the command of Peter Stuyvesant tried to retake the island. It was unsuccessful and Stuyvesant lost his leg.
The conflicts in Europe changed the destiny of the Island. The end of the eighty years war between Spain and Netherlands forced the Spanish to leave Sint Maarten because they didn’t need a base in
The neighbors did not coexist peacefully between 1648 and 1816 and Dutch side was concentrated on commercial trading as salt,
Saint Martin ( French Side) had been included
In 1954, Sint Maarten belonged to the Netherlands Antilles that regrouped several territories from Caribbean Islands. In 2010, Sint Maarten was detaching itself administratively to become an independent nation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.