Levuka

Levuka grew out of the beach trade. From about 1820 European and American traders, missionaries, shipwrights, speculators and beachcombers settled on the narrow shelf of land between the reef and the hills of Ovalau, living under the protection of local chiefs, and the place became the first modern town in the islands. The American David Whippey, who reached Fiji in 1824, was the best known of them: he settled at Levuka, became envoy to the chiefs of Bau and later served as United States vice-consul. By 1870 more than two thousand people lived here, and the town had Fiji's first bank, post office, school, hospital, private club and town hall.

Its high point came in 1871, when the Kingdom of Fiji was founded and Seru Epenisa Cakobau was crowned king at Levuka. The kingdom's finances collapsed, and on 10 October 1874 the Deed of Cession transferring the islands to Britain was signed at Nasova, just south of the town, which remained the capital of the new colony. Trade boomed briefly, and Fiji's first newspaper, the Fiji Times, was founded here in 1869. But the 600-metre hills around the town, many of them cliffed, left no room for a growing administration, and in 1877 the government moved to Suva, a transfer made official in 1882.

Levuka never recovered its importance, and that is why so much of it survives. The timber shopfronts, churches, clubs and cemeteries of the colonial decades were never replaced, and in June 2013 the town was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as exceptional testimony to the late colonial port towns of the Pacific. The Pacific Fishing Company was founded in 1964 and its cannery opened in 1976, and it has kept the town working since.

Levuka's identity rests on being the place where modern Fiji began, and on an unusual mixture of communities packed into one street. Descendants of the early settlers, known as Part-Europeans, have long been prominent here, alongside iTaukei villagers, Indo-Fijian shopkeeping families and people of Chinese descent whose stores have stood on the main street for generations. The old Ovalau Club, the churches of several denominations, the school buildings, the cemeteries and the remains of Lodge Polynesia — the oldest Masonic lodge in the South Pacific, burnt during the unrest that followed the coup of 2000 — record that layering.

The island's own traditions remain strong. Ovalau belongs to the Lomaiviti group, and villages around the coast hold to the chiefly order, the sevusevu welcome with kava and the lovo feast for weddings, funerals and church openings. Lovoni, in the crater at the island's heart, is proud of a long resistance to Cakobau that ended in 1871 with defeat by Cakobau's government, after which some two thousand Lovoni people were sold to settlers for £6 a head and held in labour for five years — a history its residents still recount to visitors.

Daily manners are small-town: greetings to strangers, an early evening, and Sunday given to church, with hymn singing audible along the street. Rugby and football are played on the town ground, and heritage matters practically as well as sentimentally here, because World Heritage status brings rules about what owners may do to their verandahs, roofs and shopfronts.

Some 1,100 people live in the town itself, with about 3,000 more on its fringes and around 8,900 on Ovalau as a whole. The Pacific Fishing Company's cannery, which freezes and cans tuna for export, is the island's largest private employer, and its shifts set the rhythm of the working day; the government offices, the school, the hospital, the shops and a small tourist trade account for most of the rest; tourism, as the island's isolation dictates, plays only a minor part in the economy.

Life is compressed into the strip between sea and hillside. Shopping is done at the market and the general stores, children walk to school up the hill, and the afternoon carriers take villagers home with sacks of flour and kerosene. Stores close early, the street is dark by mid-evening, and kava sessions carry the night in houses and halls. Many families depend partly on money sent back from relatives in Suva or overseas.

The town's difficulties are those of a small island place: young people leaving for the capital, the expense and unreliability of transport, ageing timber buildings that are costly to maintain in a wet climate, and exposure to cyclones and rising seas along an exposed waterfront. Heritage tourism is modest but is the main hope for new income beyond the cannery.

Levuka eats from its gardens, its reef and its shops. The iTaukei base is dalo (taro), cassava and breadfruit, with rourou — taro leaves simmered in coconut cream — and palusami, parcels of leaves baked with coconut cream. Fish is central: reef fish grilled or fried, octopus and crab from the shallows, and kokoda, raw fish marinated in lime juice and coconut cream. Lovo, the earth oven of hot stones, appears at every celebration.

The shopkeeping families brought other kitchens. Indo-Fijian curries of fish, goat and vegetables with roti and dhal are everyday food, and Chinese-influenced dishes, above all chop suey, have been absorbed into local cooking to the point where they turn up at village feasts. Tinned tuna from the cannery on the edge of town is a staple of the island's cupboards, eaten with rice, cassava or in a coconut curry.

Tropical fruit — papaya, mango, pineapple, bananas and citrus — comes from the island's gardens in season, and bakeries sell long loaves and coconut buns in the morning. Drinks are tea, cordials, Fiji Bitter, and above all yaqona, the kava prepared from pounded root and served from a wooden tanoa bowl, which is both the town's evening habit and the formal way a visitor is welcomed.