Nha Trang

The bay was part of the Cham world for more than a thousand years. The towers of Po Nagar on the hill above the Cái River were built from around the 8th century over an older sanctuary, dedicated to the goddess the Vietnamese later worshipped as Thiên Y A Na, and they remained in use as the region passed from Champa to Vietnamese control in the 17th century. The settlement below stayed a fishing and trading village of no great size.

French rule changed it. The colonial administration built a port and a railway along the coast, and in 1895 Alexandre Yersin, the bacteriologist who had isolated the plague bacillus in Hong Kong the year before, founded a Pasteur Institute here; he lived in the town until his death in 1943, introduced rubber and quinine cultivation to the highlands behind it, and is still honoured locally. A seaside resort grew up alongside the laboratories.

During the war the deep-water harbour at Cam Ranh Bay, south of the city, became a major American base, and after 1975 it was leased to the Soviet navy for decades, which left a Russian connection that persists in the city's tourism. Nha Trang itself was developed as a resort from the 1990s: the beach road was landscaped, high-rise hotels went up along Trần Phú, and charter flights brought Russian and then Chinese and Korean visitors in large numbers. The tourism economy collapsed and rebuilt itself after the pandemic years. In June 2025 the province of Khánh Hòa was enlarged by the merger of neighbouring Ninh Thuận, and on 1 July Nha Trang ceased to exist as a municipal city when district-level units were abolished across Vietnam.

Nha Trang's public culture is that of a Vietnamese seaside city: early mornings on the sand, evening promenades, karaoke, and large family meals of seafood. It is more cosmopolitan than its size suggests, because of a long succession of foreign communities — French scientists and officials, Soviet and Russian naval families and holidaymakers, and more recently Chinese and Korean visitors — and Cyrillic signs on restaurants are still a common sight.

The older cultural layer is Cham and maritime. Po Nagar is a living temple as well as a monument, and its spring festival is the largest folk festival of the year in Khánh Hòa, bringing Vietnamese Buddhists and Cham families to the same hill. Fishing villages around the bay keep the whale cult of the central coast, with shrines to Ông, the whale spirit, and ceremonies before the season. Khánh Hòa is also famous for the harvesting of swiftlet nests from the island cliffs, an old and closely guarded trade.

Manners are relaxed and commercial. Bargaining is normal in the market, less so in shops; hospitality is warm and direct; and Vietnamese visitors, who now outnumber foreigners, set the tone in the restaurants and on the beach. Religious life mixes Buddhism, ancestor worship and a visible Catholic minority, whose stone cathedral stands on its rock in the middle of the city.

About 535,000 people lived in Nha Trang in 2023, and it is the main city of Khánh Hòa province and a naval as well as a tourist centre. Tourism, fishing, shipbuilding, fish and seafood processing, salt, swiftlet nests and a growing number of service jobs support the population, and the surrounding countryside grows rice, sugar cane and fruit and supplies the markets.

The city wakes very early. Boats come in to the river mouth and the port before dawn, the beach fills with swimmers and exercise groups by six, and the market is busiest in the first hours of the day. Midday is quiet and hot; work resumes in the late afternoon; and the evening belongs to the seafront, where families walk, children play in the park and the restaurants and beer stalls fill.

Most residents live in narrow houses on the grid of streets behind the hotels, where prices and rents are far lower than on the sea front. The pressures are those of a resort city: dependence on visitor numbers that can drop sharply, building on the hillsides and the flooding and landslides that have followed heavy rain, and damage to the coral in the bay, which is a protected area. The sea remains the city's livelihood and its daily routine.

Fish, not meat, is the basis of the local kitchen. Bún cá, rice noodles in a clear broth made from mackerel bones with cakes of pounded fish, is eaten at breakfast, and the city's own version adds sứa — strips of jellyfish, crisp and cool, that give bún sứa its texture. Bánh canh chả cá, with thick tapioca noodles, is a close relative. Seafood is otherwise treated simply: lobster, mantis shrimp, scallops, clams and snails grilled with spring onion oil or steamed with lemongrass.

The inland dishes come from the villages around. Nem nướng Ninh Hòa, grilled pork sausage from a town north of the city, is rolled at the table in rice paper with herbs, green banana, star fruit and a strip of fried pastry, then dipped in a thick sweet-savoury sauce. Bánh căn, little rice-flour pancakes cooked in a clay mould over charcoal, often with quail egg or squid, are sold from pavement grills, and bánh xèo comes filled with prawns or squid.

Khánh Hòa's luxury product is yến sào, the swiftlet nest harvested from the cliffs of the bay's islands and sold as a tonic drink and in sweet soups. The everyday version of indulgence is simpler: iced coffee with condensed milk, sugarcane juice, chè of beans and jelly in coconut milk, and mangoes from the orchards inland. Dried squid, fish sauce and sesame sweets are what visitors carry home.