Koror

Koror was a powerful village long before it was a town. Its high chief, the Ibedul, was among the most powerful of Palau's traditional chiefs, and the island's position among the reefs made it a centre of canoe traffic and exchange. British ships began calling in the late eighteenth century after the East India Company packet Antelope was wrecked on Ulong in 1783; the Ibedul's son Lee Boo sailed to England with the survivors and died there of smallpox soon after arriving.

Spain claimed Palau and sold it to Germany in 1899, and Japan took the islands in the First World War. Koror was then rebuilt as the administrative capital of the whole South Seas Mandate, an ordered colonial town with offices, schools, a hospital, shops, a shrine and thousands of Japanese and Okinawan residents who outnumbered Palauans. American bombing in 1944 destroyed much of it, and the Japanese garrison was left isolated until the surrender.

After the war the United States administered Palau from Koror as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and the town remained the capital through the long, contested negotiations that led to the Compact of Free Association in 1994. The bridge to Babeldaob, first built in the 1970s, collapsed in September 1996, cutting the town off from the airport and its water supply; a replacement funded by Japan opened in 2002. The capital moved to Ngerulmud on Babeldaob in 2006, but Koror kept the population, the port, the shops and the dive industry that now underpins it.

Koror is where Palau's customary order meets its modern state. Clans are matrilineal: land, titles and the beads and bars of traditional money pass through women, and senior women choose and can remove the chiefs who speak for a village. The Ibedul's standing is still recognised, and the bai — the meeting house whose painted gable carries legends and histories — remains the emblem of that order.

Customary obligation is expensive and inescapable. A first-birthday ceremony, a funeral or the conferring of a title draws clans from across the country and involves large exchanges of food, cash and traditional money, and a family may spend heavily on one in a month when money is short. Christianity is the majority faith, with Catholic and Protestant churches through the town, while the syncretic Modekngei religion still has followers.

Japanese rule left loanwords, a taste for sashimi and a strong local following for baseball, which Palauans play with unusual seriousness; the town also hosted the Pacific Mini Games in 2025. Conservation is close to a civic identity — the Palau Pledge, the national marine sanctuary and the shark sanctuary are matters of pride — and evenings are spent on porches and waterfronts chewing betel nut and talking, in a town small enough that most people are related or at least known.

Roughly twelve and a half thousand people live in Koror, about half the population of Palau, in houses spread along ridges and shorelines rather than in dense blocks. The working day starts early and government, tourism and retail provide most of the formal jobs, with diving and boat operations the best known of them. A large share of the workforce comes from abroad, chiefly the Philippines and Bangladesh, staffing shops, restaurants, construction and domestic work.

Almost everything is imported through the port at Malakal, which makes shop prices high and shipping delays a constant subject of conversation. Power is generated from imported fuel, water comes from Babeldaob, and both are vulnerable to storms and drought. Tourism has been unstable — the loss of Chinese group tours and then the closure of the borders left empty hotels and half-finished buildings around the town — and the economy also depends on Compact funding from the United States, fishing licences and, increasingly, defence construction linked to American installations on Babeldaob.

Daily rhythms revolve around the sea and the family. Fishing after work, gardens of taro and cassava, church on Sunday, basketball and baseball in the evening, and the run of customary ceremonies that require attendance and contribution. Diabetes and heart disease have risen with a diet of imported food, and rising seas, coral bleaching and stronger storms are practical worries rather than distant ones.

Palauan cooking in Koror rests on the reef and the taro patch. Reef and pelagic fish are eaten grilled, in soup, or raw as sashimi, a Japanese habit fully absorbed into local eating, and mangrove crab is prized, steamed and pulled apart by hand. Taro, grown in freshwater patches tended by women, is the staple that carries ceremonial weight, alongside cassava, yam, sweet potato and breadfruit. A thick soup of taro leaves cooked with coconut milk, often with crab or fish in it, is the dish visitors are most often offered. Fruit bat soup is a Palauan delicacy that some restaurants still prepare.

The town's restaurants reflect its history and its workforce. Japanese kitchens serve sashimi, bento and noodles; Filipino cooks make adobo, pancit and lumpia; Chinese, Korean, Indian and American places fill the rest of the main street, and hotel restaurants cook reef fish for visitors.

Coconut water, calamansi and tropical fruit juices are the everyday drinks, with imported beer and a locally brewed beer in bars, and coffee shops in the centre. Betel nut, chewed with lime and pepper leaf, is sold everywhere and functions as the town's real social habit, while supermarket shelves of rice, tinned meat and frozen goods show how much of the diet arrives by ship.