Vanuatu

Eighty islands of ash, coral and kastom

Vanuatu is a Melanesian archipelago of some eighty volcanic and coral islands in the southwestern Pacific, settled around three thousand years ago by Austronesian seafarers of the Lapita culture whose oldest known Pacific cemetery lies at Teouma on Efate. Its oral history reveres the paramount chief Roi Mata, whose seventeenth-century domain is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. After European contact from 1606, the islands endured the sandalwood trade, the 'blackbirding' labour traffic and catastrophic depopulation by disease, then seven decades under a famously duplicated Anglo-French Condominium known as the New Hebrides. Vanuatu became an independent republic on 30 July 1980 and today, vulnerable to cyclones and rising seas, leads the world's climate diplomacy.