Vung Tau

The headland has guarded the approaches to Saigon for as long as ships have used them. Vietnamese fishing families settled the bays, and the Nguyễn emperors posted soldiers here against pirates, giving the place one of its early names. Portuguese sailors knew the cape as Cape Saint Jacques, and the French, who seized the approaches in 1859, kept the name as Cap Saint-Jacques and made the headland the outer defence of their new colony, building coastal batteries on both hills and the lighthouse on the Small Mountain in 1862.

By the end of the 19th century it had become a seaside resort. Governors built villas on the slopes, including the white Villa Blanche, known as Bạch Dinh, on the slope of the Big Mountain, and Saigon society came down for the sea air. During the war the area served as a logistics base and rest centre, and the Australian and New Zealand forces in the province were based at Núi Đất inland, with a supply base at the city itself.

After 1975 the character of the place changed again. Oil and gas were found offshore in the Cửu Long and Nam Côn Sơn basins, and from the 1980s the city became the onshore base of the industry, with Soviet-Vietnamese and later international companies, helicopters, supply vessels and a foreign workforce. Oil money and weekend tourism from Ho Chi Minh City have driven its growth since, and in 2025 the province of Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu was merged into an enlarged Ho Chi Minh City, the old city becoming one of its wards.

Vung Tau is a holiday town for southerners first of all, and its culture reflects that: seafood restaurants, promenades, kite-flying on the beach in the windy months and families camped on the sand in the late afternoon. It has none of the package-resort feel of the coast further north, and most of the crowds are Vietnamese.

Religion is unusually visible for a beach city. The Christ statue on the southern hill, the Buddhist complex on the northern one, a large Catholic community with churches near both beaches and Chinese temples in the older streets all sit within a short distance of each other. The fishing community keeps the whale cult of the southern coast, honouring whales that come ashore; their bones are preserved at the Thắng Tam temple, and the Nghinh Ông festival takes the community out to sea in procession.

The oil industry has left its own mark: a long-established Russian community dating from the Soviet-era joint venture, with a Russian quarter, Orthodox services and restaurants, alongside other foreign workers. The result is a city that mixes fishing families, oil engineers, hotel workers and weekenders, informal in manner and used to outsiders, and one where dress rules are nonetheless taken seriously at the religious sites.

Vũng Tàu ward, the old downtown and the beaches, covers about 17 square kilometres and had some 117,000 residents at the end of 2024, with the built-up area running on beyond it along the coast. Oil and gas services form the economic backbone — supply bases, engineering yards and offices, with helicopters crossing to the rigs — alongside a large fishing fleet, fish processing, a busy container port complex up the river at Cái Mép and the tourism that peaks at weekends.

Residential life runs behind the seafronts: streets of narrow houses, markets, schools and cafés, with newer apartment blocks near the Back Beach. Mornings start with the fish market and exercise groups on the promenade, the middle of the day is quiet, and the evening brings the seafront alive again as the heat drops. Friday brings traffic from Ho Chi Minh City and Sunday afternoon takes it away.

The city's issues are those of a coast under pressure: beach erosion and occasional pollution, the effect of construction on the hillsides, the dependence of jobs on the oil price and on weekend visitors, and the balance between port expansion up the river and the tourism the beaches support. The 2025 reorganisation, which merged the province into the enlarged Ho Chi Minh City, has tied its future still more closely to the metropolis.

Bánh khọt is the dish the city is known for: small rice-flour and coconut-milk batter cakes cooked in a dimpled cast-iron pan until the edges crisp, each topped with a prawn, dusted with dried shrimp and spring onion oil and eaten wrapped in lettuce and herbs with a bowl of sweetened fish sauce. Whole restaurants do nothing else, and it is the standard thing to eat before heading to the beach.

Seafood follows, unloaded at the harbour and cooked plainly. Grilled squid, steamed crab with ginger, mantis shrimp, scallops with spring onion and peanuts, and tamarind prawns are the standards, eaten with chilli-lime salt. Lẩu cá đuối, stingray hotpot soured with bamboo shoots, is a local favourite, as is bánh canh ghẹ, thick noodles in a crab broth. The oyster farms of the island north of the city supply grilled and raw oysters to restaurants built out over the water.

Beyond that the city eats southern Vietnamese: bánh mì, cơm tấm, hủ tiếu and the whole range of ốc, shellfish cooked dozens of ways over beer in the evening. Dried and seasoned squid, fish sauce and cashew nuts are the things people buy to take home. Vietnamese iced coffee is drunk in the promenade cafés, coconut water is sold along the beach, and Bia Saigon is the local beer.