It began in 1924, when the Lago Petroleum Corporation chose Aruba as a transshipment point for crude oil extracted from beneath Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. The lake's shallow, sandbar-choked entrance demanded specialized vessels -- lake tankers with flat bottoms and shallow draft that could clear the bar and reach open water. Aruba, just 15 miles off the Venezuelan coast, was the obvious staging ground. For four years, crude oil simply passed through the island on its way elsewhere. Then, in 1928, a refinery was built, and Aruba transformed from way station to processing hub. The Lago Oil and Transport Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, operated the facility, and at its peak the refinery ranked among the largest in the world, converting raw Venezuelan petroleum into finished products shipped to markets across the globe.

The refinery needed skilled workers, and skilled workers needed somewhere to live. Lago Colony grew up between the refinery gates and the rocky hill of Seroe Colorado at the island's eastern tip. The population was international but predominantly American, with a significant contingent of British, Irish, and Scottish officers who managed the lake tanker fleet. Dutch, Danish, and Spanish workers added to the mix. The colony was self-contained to a degree that seems almost fantastical: its own hospital, its own church, its own school with 180 students. In the 1950s, the Aruba Esso Club was built at the man-made lagoon of Baby Beach, complete with a restaurant, a dance floor, and a baseball stadium. A dock reached into the lagoon, flanked by small shacks. Children swam in the calm, shallow water while their parents socialized at the club. The colony officially changed its name to Seroe Colorado in 1958, but longtime residents continued to call it Lago Colony.

On March 31, 1985, Exxon shut down the Lago refinery. The decision was economic -- shifting global oil markets had eroded the refinery's competitive position -- but its effects were seismic for the community built around it. Without the refinery, there was no reason for the colony to exist. Families left. Houses emptied. The infrastructure that had sustained a self-sufficient town for six decades began its slow surrender to tropical weather and neglect. The refinery itself changed hands multiple times. Valero Energy Corporation eventually purchased it, reopened it, then shut it down again. In December 2010, Valero announced another reopening, but the cycle of starts and stops only underscored how precarious the refinery's future had become. The colony's homes were gradually handed over to the Aruban government or sold to private buyers, most of whom had no connection to the oil industry that built them.

Walk through Seroe Colorado today and the evidence of Lago Colony is sparse. A few original houses remain, their American-suburban architecture looking increasingly out of place among newer island construction. The Esso Club at Baby Beach survives as a single large abandoned building, its dance floor silent, its baseball diamond reclaimed by scrub. One business still operates from the structure -- a dive shop, the last commercial tenant of a facility that once anchored the community's social life. The rest is memory, preserved in the recollections of former residents and in the archives of the Lago Colony website, where photographs show swimming pools, garden parties, and children in American school uniforms squinting into Caribbean sunlight. The oil economy that created this improbable place also determined its lifespan. When the crude stopped flowing from Lake Maracaibo, the colony had no second act.