Port Vila

People have lived on Efate for around three thousand years, and Lapita pottery from the region places the island among the earliest settled in the western Pacific. The bay was part of the domain remembered in oral tradition as that of Roi Mata, a paramount chief whose residence and burial site north-west of the modern city are now a World Heritage Site. Europeans came in numbers in the 19th century after sandalwood traders and, from the 1860s, labour recruiters who took islanders to work on plantations in Queensland and Fiji.

The settlement on Vila Bay grew as British and French planters, missionaries and traders established themselves. In 1889 the town's settlers declared a self-governing commune, Franceville, an experiment that lasted only months but that extended the vote unusually widely for its day. Rivalry between the two colonial powers was settled in 1906 by the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides, a joint administration with two police forces, two legal systems, two school systems and two of almost everything else, with Port Vila as its capital. American forces used Efate as a base during the Second World War, though the larger installations were on Espiritu Santo.

The independence movement of the 1970s was led from the town, and Vanuatu became independent on 30 July 1980 under Walter Lini. Since then Port Vila has grown quickly with migration from the outer islands. Cyclone Pam caused severe damage in 2015, and the earthquake of 17 December 2024 damaged buildings and infrastructure in the centre; almost every house in the city was damaged and the market house was later demolished.

Port Vila is where the whole archipelago meets. Migrants from the country's sixty-five inhabited islands live here, each with their own language — Vanuatu has over a hundred — and Bislama serves as the common tongue, with English and French as the other official languages and a school system still divided between them. Island associations, churches and family networks organise much of social life, and people identify strongly with their home island.

Kastom, the body of customary law, knowledge and ceremony, remains authoritative alongside the state: the Malvatumauri, the national council of chiefs, meets here, and chiefs settle many local disputes. The nakamal, both a meeting place and a kava bar, is where decisions are discussed and evenings are spent, and the shell of kava is offered rather than sold in ceremonial settings. Sand drawing, made with one continuous finger line in the ground, and the slit drums and carvings in the National Museum are among the best-known art forms; string band music, reggae and gospel dominate live performance, and Fest'Napuan is the annual showcase.

Church attendance is high, mainly Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic, and Sunday is quiet. Football is the main sport, with a league of its own in the capital, and national-day celebrations in July bring custom dance groups from across the islands into the capital. Manners are unhurried and understated; directness and impatience read as rudeness.

About 50,000 people live in Port Vila, roughly a sixth of Vanuatu's population, and the city has grown fast as families move in from the outer islands. Much of that growth has gone into informal settlements on the edges of the urban area, where housing, water and drainage lag behind. Custom land ownership shapes where building can happen, and leases rather than freehold underpin most development.

The economy runs on tourism, the port, government, construction and offshore financial services, with cruise passengers and Australian and New Zealand visitors the largest tourist groups. Agriculture around the city supplies the market house, and many households depend on seasonal work schemes in Australia and New Zealand, whose remittances are now a major part of national income. Two shocks fell together in 2024: the liquidation of the national airline, which cut flights, and the December earthquake, which closed offices and shops in the centre and damaged the main wharf.

Days start early, with the market and building sites busy soon after dawn and offices closing in the middle of the afternoon; the nakamals fill at dusk. Power and water are expensive, cyclone season dictates the household calendar between November and April, and the price of imported rice, tinned fish and fuel is a constant subject.

Port Vila has a reputation for eating well by the standards of the Pacific, which rests on two traditions side by side. The first is Ni-Vanuatu island food, at its plainest and best at the market stalls: laplap, the national dish, is grated yam, taro, banana or breadfruit mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a stone oven, sometimes with chicken, beef or fish. Simboro is a steamed roll of grated banana, manioc or taro in banana leaves with coconut milk, and meals come with island cabbage, rice and fish.

The second is the French inheritance of the condominium: bakeries turning out baguettes and pastries, restaurants cooking with butter and wine, and a taste for long lunches. Vanuatu beef is a local speciality, as are reef fish, tuna, lobster and coconut crab, the last a delicacy whose capture is limited by minimum size rules.

Tanna coffee, grown in the south of the country, is served widely; local fruit juices, coconut water and Tusker, the national beer, are the standard drinks. Above all there is kava, pounded fresh from the root and drunk in nakamals at dusk, central to the city's evenings.