Espiritu Santo

Espiritu Santo carries the oldest European name in Vanuatu. In 1606 the Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernández de Quirós anchored in Big Bay in the north and named the land La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo, in the belief that he had reached the great southern continent. The island had already been settled for thousands of years by Melanesian communities whose languages, gardens and kastom authority remain the basis of village life, and in the 19th century it was reached by sandalwood traders, labour recruiters and missionaries, with French and British planters taking coastal land for coconuts and cattle.

The transformation came in 1942. The United States built Base Button here, the largest American base in the South Pacific, with airfields, wharves, hospitals and roads; more than half a million service personnel passed through the New Hebrides and Espiritu Santo, supporting the Solomon Islands campaign. Two relics define the island's tourism: the President Coolidge, a liner turned troopship that struck defensive mines and sank off Luganville in October 1942, and Million Dollar Point, where surplus equipment was dumped into the sea at the end of the war. Luganville itself, laid out on the base's grid, grew into the country's second town.

Around independence the island was the centre of the Nagriamel movement led by Jimmy Stevens, which declared the Republic of Vemerana on the eve of independence in 1980; the rebellion, known as the Coconut War, was put down between May and August that year with Papua New Guinean troops. Since then Santo has depended on copra, cocoa, kava, cattle and tourism. Cyclone Harold crossed the island in April 2020, damaging houses, crops and infrastructure across the province.

Santo is linguistically varied even by the standards of Vanuatu, with more than thirty local languages spoken in its villages and Bislama used between them. French is the everyday second language in Catholic villages such as Port Olry, and Luganville itself was largely French-speaking by the later twentieth century, though more of its people now read English than French — a division that runs back to the condominium's two school systems and still shapes families and politics.

Kastom remains the framework of village life in the interior and the west, where chiefs hold authority, land and reefs belong to clans, and knowledge of gardens, medicine and ceremony passes through families. Access to almost any natural site on the island is therefore a matter of asking the right community, and the small fees charged at beaches, caves and other sites are the mechanism by which tourism income reaches landowners. Slit drums, pig-tusk exchange and grade-taking ceremonies are part of custom practice in parts of the island.

Luganville's culture is more mixed: Ni-Vanuatu from across the archipelago, descendants of Vietnamese plantation workers brought in the colonial period, Chinese traders and Francophone families. Church attendance is high, Sunday is quiet, and evenings belong to the nakamal, where kava is drunk in near silence. Football and school sport fill the afternoons, and Independence Day in July is the year's biggest public event.

Around 37,000 people live on Espiritu Santo, roughly 18,000 of them in Luganville, which makes the island the main population centre of northern Vanuatu. Villages line the east coast road and the bays; the interior is thinly settled, with communities that may be a day's walk from a road. Luganville has the province's hospital, its secondary schools and its wharf, so people travel in for medicine, schooling, banking and shipping.

The economy is more agricultural than the capital's. Santo's cattle farms, some of them founded by French settlers, send beef to Japan, Australia and other Pacific countries, while villages grow copra, cocoa, kava and peanuts, and coastal fishing and gardens feed households. Tourism is concentrated on diving, the north-east beaches and cruise calls, and seasonal work in Australia and New Zealand sends money home to many families.

Daily rhythms follow the light and the weather: gardening and fishing at dawn, the market and offices in the morning, quiet afternoons, kava at dusk. Road conditions dictate much of what is possible, and the wet season cuts off parts of the island. The recurring concerns are cyclone recovery, the price of shipping and fuel, the reliability of domestic flights, and access to health care and secondary education outside the town.

Santo eats the island staples with more meat than most of Vanuatu. Laplap, the national dish, is grated yam, taro, breadfruit or banana mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a stone oven, and it is served with island cabbage and whatever protein is to hand. Simboro, a steamed roll of grated banana, manioc or taro wrapped in banana leaves with coconut milk, appears at the market and at feasts.

The island's cattle make beef unusually common: steak, beef stew and sausages are standard in Luganville, and Santo beef is sold across the country and exported. Seafood is the other strength: reef fish, lobster, crab and prawns are grilled simply with lime and coconut, and coconut crab is a delicacy whose capture is limited by minimum size rules.

Fruit is abundant — pawpaw, mango, pineapple, citrus, breadfruit and bananas — and the market sells island greens, peanuts and taro alongside them. Bakeries turn out baguettes and pastries, a French inheritance reinforced by Port Olry's Francophone community, and Vietnamese-descended families run long-standing kitchens in town. Tanna coffee, local juices and Tusker beer are drunk alongside kava, which is grown on the island and pounded fresh in the nakamals each evening.