Vanuatu

The islands were settled around three thousand years ago by the Lapita people, ancestors of Melanesians and Polynesians, and developed into hundreds of small communities with their own languages, chiefly systems, and customs — a diversity that survives to a remarkable degree. Europeans arrived with the Portuguese navigator Queirós, sailing for Spain, in 1606, and Captain Cook, who named the group the New Hebrides, in 1774.

In the nineteenth century "blackbirding" ships carried tens of thousands of islanders, often by force, to work plantations in Queensland and Fiji, and sandalwood traders and missionaries followed. Britain and France, unable to agree on who should control the islands, settled in 1906 on a joint administration — the Condominium — under which the New Hebrides had two of almost everything: two police forces, two currencies, two legal systems, and no nationality for its own people. Cynics called it the "Pandemonium".

Independence came in 1980 as the Republic of Vanuatu, briefly disrupted by an attempted secession on Espiritu Santo (the "Coconut War"). Since then it has been a parliamentary democracy, stable in broad terms but with frequent changes of government through votes of no confidence; Jotham Napat became prime minister in February 2025. Cyclone Pam in 2015, Cyclone Harold in 2020, and the magnitude 7.3 earthquake at Port Vila on 17 December 2024, which killed at least 14 people and brought down buildings in the capital, have each caused severe damage, and Vanuatu has become a leading advocate for global action on climate change, successfully pushing for a 2025 International Court of Justice opinion on states' climate obligations.

Kastom — the body of indigenous custom, law, ritual, land tenure, and knowledge — is central and is explicitly protected in the constitution alongside Christianity, which most ni-Vanuatu also practise. Chiefs retain real authority, and a person's standing is often tied to rank, earned through ceremony and the exchange of pigs, mats, and kava, with the curved tusks of a specially raised pig a mark of status.

Land is held by clans under customary tenure, not the state, and permission is needed to enter or use it. Each island and district has distinct dances, music, sand drawing (a UNESCO-listed art), grade-taking ceremonies, and magic traditions. On Tanna, the John Frum movement and the Prince Philip Movement — which venerated the Duke of Edinburgh as a divine figure — are well-known "cargo cults".

Kava, made from the pounded root of a pepper plant and drunk from a shell in the nakamal at dusk, is the social and ceremonial drink; the plant was first domesticated in northern Vanuatu, and it is treated with quiet respect.

More than 300,000 people live in Vanuatu, roughly a sixth of them in Port Vila on Efate and another cluster in Luganville on Espiritu Santo; the rest are spread thinly across dozens of islands in villages that live largely by subsistence. Gardening (yam, taro, manioc, banana), fishing, pig-raising, and small cash crops of copra, kava, cocoa, and coffee sustain most households.

The cash economy depends on tourism (cruise ships call at Port Vila and Luganville), agriculture, an offshore financial centre, and — controversially — the sale of citizenship, which has brought in significant revenue but cost the Vanuatu passport its visa-free access to Britain and the European Union. Seasonal work schemes in Australia and New Zealand are an increasingly important source of income and remittances.

Life on the outer islands is slow, communal, and church- and kastom-centred, with limited electricity, roads, and communications, and a constant awareness of the next cyclone or earthquake.

The national dish is laplap: grated root vegetable or green banana pounded into a dough, spread with coconut cream and often meat, fish, or island cabbage, wrapped in leaves, and baked in an earth oven for hours. Simboro, a steamed roll of grated banana, manioc or yam wrapped in leaves and covered in coconut milk, is a popular relative.

Everyday food is root crops — taro, yam, sweet potato, manioc — with reef fish, coconut in every form, island cabbage, and pork or chicken for occasions. The coconut crab, a large land crab, is a delicacy. Port Vila's market and its ring of food trucks serve cheap plates of these dishes alongside rice and imported foods; the market building itself was wrecked in the December 2024 earthquake and demolished.

Kava is the drink of the evening, not alcohol; Tanna also grows a well-regarded coffee, and fresh coconut water and tropical fruit are everywhere.

Tanna Island's Mount Yasur is the star: a small, safely climbable volcano that has erupted mildly and almost without pause for centuries, with visits at dusk to watch glowing rock hurled from the crater. Tanna also has kastom villages, hot springs, giant banyans, and the John Frum community at Sulphur Bay.

Espiritu Santo, the largest island, is the adventure base: the postcard-perfect Champagne Beach, rivers and caves to explore on the west side, and — offshore — the wreck of the SS President Coolidge, a converted liner that sank in 1942 and is one of the world's most accessible large wreck dives, along with "Million Dollar Point", where US forces dumped their equipment at the end of the war.

Efate, the main island, has Port Vila's harbour and market, the Mele Cascades, blue lagoons, and offshore islets. Pentecost Island hosts the Naghol land diving between April and June, in which men leap from wooden towers with only vines tied to their ankles — the ritual that inspired the bungee jump. Ambrym is a moody island of twin lava-lake volcanoes and a strong magic tradition, and Gaua and Vanua Lava in the north have waterfalls and rarely-visited volcanoes.