Aruba Mural Tours is run by the people who brought the artists to San Nicolas — the organisers of the Aruba Art Fair. Not guides who read up on the walls afterwards. The ones who found them, paid for them and asked the neighbours first.
Aruba Mural Tours is a sister initiative of ArtisA, the foundation behind the Aruba Art Fair. That is not a marketing line — it is the reason the tour exists. The same people run the gallery, commission the murals and walk you past them.
Your guide can tell you which neighbour said yes first, what the artist wanted the wall to say, and which pieces caused an argument. That is an insider’s view of San Nicolas, told by the people who changed it.
San Nicolas, 2025 — a wall still going up.
Arte para la vida. Bogotá, 2015. The wall that started it.
A mural in Bogotá — a boy playing a trumpet in a splash of colour, under the words Arte para la vida. Art for life. Tito Bolivar stood in front of it in 2015 and went home wanting the same thing for his own island.
What he found back in Aruba was a cultural emptiness, and a town south of the airport that most visitors drove straight past. San Nicolas had been built around a refinery. When the work went, the people went, and the shutters stayed down.
So he started inviting artists. Bordalo II. Bond Truluv. In the end, people from eleven countries. He knocked on doors and asked for walls. By 2019 Forbes was calling San Nicolas the street art capital of the Caribbean.
Two hours on foot through San Nicolas, most days, from the ArtisA gallery. Seven of them, from a $15 evening walk to a full day with a workshop.
Every year the Aruba Art Fair brings new artists to new walls. The murals you photograph on a tour were commissioned here.
ArtisA and Space21 are open all week, free to walk into. Local artists show and sell work, and the workshops happen there.
Most street art tours are run by fans of the scene. Ours are run by the organisers of the Aruba Art Fair — the ones who invited the artists, raised the money and knocked on the doors.
Came home from Bogotá in 2015 having seen a boy painted on a wall playing a trumpet, under the words Art for Life. He invited the first artists to San Nicolas, and he still walks the route.
[A couple of sentences about Nico — where he grew up, what this street looked like before the walls, and what he knows that is not written down anywhere.]
We did not arrive after the murals. We were there when the first artists were invited and the first neighbour said yes.
Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Greece and more. Your guide can tell you who, and what they asked for.
Certificate of Excellence, and a Forbes write-up in 2019 naming San Nicolas the street art capital of the Caribbean.
★★★★★
“Our guide knew the artists personally. That changed the whole thing from looking at paintings to hearing a town talk about itself.”
Karen P. · Tripadvisor
Every mural in San Nicolas was paid for before it was painted — walls rented, scaffolding hired, artists flown in, paint bought. ArtisA is a foundation, not a brand. What we raise goes back into the next wall, the next workshop, and the young people who learn on them.