If Koh Rong is the party island, Koh Rong Samloem is the quiet one. Its smaller, less developed sister is where you come to do nothing at all: lie on the brilliant white sand of Saracen Bay, swim in warm, clear water, read in a hammock facing the sea, dive among corals and wait for nightfall to watch the plankton light up the water. There are no cars, no roads, no big resorts and no loud music: just beach, jungle and sea.
Its signature view is Saracen Bay, a crescent-shaped bay with perhaps the whitest, finest sand in all of Cambodia, lined with simple bungalows and small-scale resorts looking out over the water. But the island has more to it. On the other side, a short jungle trail away, is Sunset Beach (Star Beach), perfect for sunset. To the south is the secluded Lazy Beach, and to the north the village of M'Pai Bay, a relaxed backpacker corner with more of a social scene but nothing over the top.
Koh Rong Samloem is also the best place in Cambodia to dive. Its waters are still lightly visited and offer good visibility, calm reefs and well-priced PADI centres that are ideal for beginners. This guide gives you a clear picture of the island: which bay to choose for your plans, how to get there and which pier to use, where to dive, how to see the plankton and how to combine it with Koh Rong. For anyone looking for paradise without the noise, Samloem is probably the most peaceful and beautiful spot on the Cambodian coast.
Like neighbouring Koh Rong, Koh Rong Samloem was for centuries a remote, almost uninhabited fishing island, brought under Cambodian administration during the French protectorate established in 1863. It stayed isolated throughout the 20th century. The Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) and the long decades of war and recovery that followed left the island untouched by any development, with its waters administered by the Navy until 2000. One unusual detail stands out in its recent history: for years the Cambodian Navy kept a base on the island (in the Saracen Bay area), and the lighthouse at the southern tip was built in French colonial times. As on the rest of the coast, tourism only arrived well into the 21st century. First came a few bungalows for adventurous backpackers, then slow, small-scale development that kept the island quieter and more unspoilt than Koh Rong. The full history of the archipelago is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Cambodia's coastline on the Gulf of Thailand: the colonial pepper towns, the port a king had built and the white-sand islands of the south.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Across from the great Koh Rong, separated by a narrow arm of the sea, lies Koh Rong Samloem, its smaller and quieter twin island. Its name is usually translated as something close to 'the island of shelter' or 'of refuge', and for centuries it lived up to that nickname: it was a remote place, covered in jungle, where a few fishing communities lived with their backs to the world, taking from the Gulf of Thailand just enough to get by.
Like the rest of the coast and islands of the Kompong Som region (today's Sihanoukville), Koh Rong Samloem was administratively absorbed into Cambodia during the French protectorate, formalised by treaty in 1863. But colonial rule barely touched life on the island: with no roads, no major ports and no resources to exploit on a large scale, Samloem remained a remote corner, home to fishermen and ringed by reefs.
Geography shaped its fate. The island is mostly mountainous and covered in jungle, with a coastline cut into sheltered bays —Saracen Bay to the east, the sunset beaches to the west, M'Pai Bay to the north— separated from one another by dense forest. The same difficult access that kept it poor and isolated for generations is, paradoxically, what makes it so appealing today: almost untouched beaches, silence and a sense of unspoilt paradise that more developed islands have already lost.
If the French presence left anything on Koh Rong Samloem, it wasn't villas or resorts but a practical structure that still stands at the southern tip of the island: a lighthouse. Built in colonial times, it guided ships sailing the waters of the Gulf of Thailand off the Cambodian coast, at a time when maritime trade in French Indochina was growing and needed navigation markers.
Today the lighthouse is one of the most popular hiking goals on the island: a walk through the jungle from the southern beaches takes you there, and from around it you get views of the gulf and the coast. It's also a quiet reminder of the island's long history, which goes back well before the bungalows and dive centres, and of the fact that these remote waters were already watched-over shipping routes more than a century ago.
Beyond the lighthouse, the mark the centuries left on Koh Rong Samloem is mostly natural: the jungle covering its interior, the reefs around its bays, the beaches that no colonial project ever transformed. Unlike Kep or Kampot on the mainland, there were no elite seaside resorts or stately architecture here: the island stayed on the sidelines of visible history, saving its beauty for a future that would take a long time to arrive.
The 20th century hit Koh Rong Samloem as it hit the whole country, although its isolation kept it away from the major events. When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and imposed the Democratic Kampuchea regime, their policy of forced collectivisation and total control reached even the remote islands of the gulf. As in the rest of Cambodia, normal life was abolished and communities were subjected to forced labour; the regime, which ruled until 1979, caused the deaths of around a quarter of the country's population.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge with the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, and through the long decades of civil war, occupation and recovery that followed, the islands came under military control. Because of its strategic position off the coast, Koh Rong Samloem hosted a Cambodian Navy presence for years, especially around Saracen Bay. Its status as a military zone helped keep the island closed to development and practically untouched throughout that period.
So while the mainland tried to rebuild after the trauma of genocide and war, Koh Rong Samloem stayed in limbo: neither destroyed nor developed, simply isolated, with its fishermen, its jungle and its beaches waiting. Only once peace had firmly taken hold, in the new century, and military control had been scaled back, did the island begin to open up tentatively to the world, this time to tourism.
Koh Rong Samloem opened up to tourism, as did the whole Cambodian coast, well into the 21st century, and at a slower pace than its neighbour Koh Rong. At first there were just a few basic bungalows for adventurous backpackers looking for untouched beaches far from the noise; over time, and especially in the 2010s, the island developed a range of small-scale accommodation —bungalows and small resorts— concentrated on the gorgeous Saracen Bay, while M'Pai Bay, in the north, established itself as the backpacker and bohemian corner.
Unlike other destinations in the region, Koh Rong Samloem has managed (so far) to grow without entirely losing its character: no loud parties, no big tower blocks, none of the chaos of Koh Touch. Its identity became precisely its tranquillity: the island for resting, diving, plankton and calm beaches, as opposed to the livelier Koh Rong. That reputation as a peaceful refuge is now its main draw and, at the same time, its challenge: how to develop without losing what makes it special.
Growth has brought its tensions here too: water management, energy (many places run on generators), waste and pressure on the reefs are real problems for a fragile island receiving more and more visitors. The marine national park created in the Koh Rong archipelago in 2018 covers these waters and aims to protect their marine life. Koh Rong Samloem embodies, on a small scale, the dilemma of the whole Cambodian coast: how to open to the world a paradise that was hidden for decades by war and isolation, without destroying in a few years what nature took centuries to create. For now, the island remains one of the most peaceful and beautiful corners of Cambodia, and those who visit tend to share the same wish: that it stays this way.
