TV channels Bonaire

Bonaire's television is the television of a small Dutch Caribbean island: local studios in Kralendijk, a multilingual audience, and a cable backbone that ties the island to the wider Caribbean.

Television on a small island

Bonaire never had the scale for a national broadcaster of its own: the island's first pictures arrived from its larger neighbour, TeleCuraçao - the Netherlands Antilles' first television station, launched in 1960 - which served Bonaire through a local repeater. The island's viewing grew around cable and local productions. Flamingo Television built the island's cable network, carrying local and regional programming in the island's languages - Papiamentu, Dutch, Spanish and English - while Telbo brought digital television packages over its telephone infrastructure. On top of that distribution layer, local channels appeared to cover the island itself.

Bonaire has been a special municipality of the Netherlands since the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010, and its broadcasting still reflects that triple belonging: local production in Papiamentu, packages in Dutch, and the Spanish- and English-language channels that the island's geography puts within reach.

The local channels

Bonaire.tv is the island's own channel, following events from the Kralendijk waterfront to the events of the southern villages and producing Papiamentu documentaries on the island's heritage - the portraits of Fuhikubo, the Herensia series, the day of Rincon. Energia TV, the former Dutch Caribbean TV, and NosTV Bonaire 2 - the second stream of a station that calls itself, with pride, the truly Bonairean channel - add further local general programming, and Live99FM carries the island's music voice onto the screen.

An island of four languages

What makes Bonaire's broadcasting unusual is its linguistic mix: a single local bulletin may pass between Papiamentu and Dutch, while the cable packages bring Spanish-language television from Venezuela and English-language networks from the wider Caribbean. For an island of some twenty thousand people, that makes the local channel the place where the island actually hears itself - covering council sessions in Kralendijk, harbour news, kite-surfing competitions on the west coast and the island's festivals.

Small in numbers but dense in connections, Bonaire's television keeps a community informed in four languages at once.