The Yasawa Islands are the Fiji half the world dreams of without knowing its name: a chain of about 20 high, rugged volcanic islands stretching more than 80 kilometres north-west of Viti Levu, with white-sand beaches, turquoise lagoons and villages where life follows the rhythm of the vanua. 'The Blue Lagoon' (1949 and 1980) was filmed here, and manta rays swim these waters every dry season.
Unlike the Mamanuca, which are closer and more touristy, the Yasawa only opened to land-based tourism in 1987: until then the government banned accommodation at the request of the local chiefs. That kept them authentic and uncrowded. Today village-run backpacker lodges sit alongside boutique resorts, nearly all with a house reef, snorkelling and kava ceremonies included.
The magic of the Yasawa is island hopping: a single catamaran, the Yasawa Flyer, runs up and down the whole chain every day, and with a Bula Pass you hop off at whichever island you like and carry on the next day. Swimming with manta rays off Drawaqa, going into the Sawa-i-Lau caves, hiking the peaks of Waya and floating in the Blue Lagoon are postcards that, once seen, you never forget.
Settled more than 3,000 years ago by Lapita seafarers, the Yasawa were for centuries a string of iTaukei villages organised around the vanua and the chiefly system. Sighted by the European James Cook in 1774 and charted by Charles Wilkes in 1840, they became part of the Fiji that Cakobau ceded to Britain in 1874. Isolated and protected by their chiefs, they stayed closed to land-based tourism until 1987; in the meantime, 'The Blue Lagoon' made them famous. The full story - from the Lapita to the present - is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓Fiji's postcard islands: two volcanic chains off the west coast of Viti Levu, with white sand and turquoise water. The Lapita people settled them three thousand years ago, and today they are home to resorts and snorkelling and were the setting for films such as Cast Away and The Blue Lagoon.
Read the history of Mamanuca and Yasawa Islands →They depart from Denarau, 91 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before any film gave them a name, the Yasawas were already the end point of one of humanity's boldest voyages. More than 3,000 years ago, around 1500-1000 BC, navigators of the Lapita culture crossed hundreds of kilometres of open sea in double-hulled canoes and reached the Fijian archipelago. They did not arrive empty-handed: they brought pigs, chickens, food crops and an unmistakable style of pottery — Lapita ware, decorated with geometric patterns stamped with a comb — which archaeologists today trace like a signature across the Pacific, from the Bismarcks to Tonga and Samoa.
These settlers were horticulturalists and experts at reading the ocean: they used the stars, the swell, the flight of birds and the colour of the water to find their way. In the Yasawas, which are long and mountainous with little fresh water, they settled in sheltered bays, grew yam and taro on the slopes, and used the reefs — the same ones that dazzle tourists today — as their pantry. Over the centuries a strong Melanesian presence was added to the Lapita base, and from that mix came iTaukei society: the Indigenous Fijians, the ancestral owners of these islands.
Life was organised around a concept that is still alive today: the vanua, which does not simply mean 'land' but the inseparable fusion of land, people, ancestors and spiritual identity. Within the vanua, the mataqali (clans) inherit collective rights over land and sea. That structure, not a Western property title, is what still explains why most of the Yasawa Islands are communally owned and why you have to ask permission before setting foot in a village.
The Fiji that Europeans found was no paradise without a history. It was a complex and often violent political world. The islands were divided into chiefdoms (yavusa and vanua) that competed for power, built alliances through marriage and waged war. Seafaring was their speciality: the great Fijian drua canoes, some more than twenty metres long, were among the finest in the Pacific, and the canoe builders of the neighbouring Lau Islands were famous throughout the region.
Europe spotted them late and from a distance. The Dutchman Abel Tasman skirted Fijian waters in 1643. The Yasawa Group was sighted by the Briton James Cook in 1774, on his second voyage, though he did not land. Only in 1840 did the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, chart the Fijian archipelago in detail, the Yasawas included. For decades the islands' reputation, fed by tales of shipwrecks and ritual cannibalism, kept traders and missionaries at bay, which in the case of the Yasawas added to their isolation.
In the 19th century, as whalers and traders in sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber) reached Fijian shores bringing muskets and new diseases, one chief made the most of the change like no one else: Seru Epenisa Cakobau, of the small but powerful island of Bau, off Viti Levu. Armed with rifles and allied with kingdoms such as Tonga, Cakobau spread his influence until he proclaimed himself Tui Viti, 'king of Fiji'. The remote, peripheral Yasawas fell within the orbit of these great power struggles without ever being at their centre.
Cakobau's power had an Achilles heel: debt. A fire at the house of the American consul John Brown Williams in 1849 led to a claim worth thousands of dollars, which foreign powers used to put pressure on him. In debt, surrounded by settlers demanding land and with no real ability to control the whole archipelago, Cakobau looked for a way out. After a first offer was turned down, he finally agreed to cede the islands to the British Empire.
On 10 October 1874, in Levuka, Cakobau, the Tongan chief Ma'afu and other high-ranking chiefs signed the Deed of Cession, which handed Fiji over to Queen Victoria. So began the Colony of Fiji, which would remain British for 96 years. The first governor, Arthur Gordon, made two decisions that would shape the country for good. He banned the sale of native land, freezing iTaukei communal ownership, which to this day covers the vast majority of Fijian land, the Yasawas included. And so as not to exploit local labour on the sugar plantations, from 1879 he brought in tens of thousands of indentured workers from India. That system, the girmit, gave rise to the large Indo-Fijian community.
For the Yasawas, cession paradoxically meant more continuity than rupture. Far from Suva and the sugar plantations, with no deep-water ports and no land for sale, they remained a world of iTaukei villages governed by their chiefs, now under the umbrella of the colonial system of 'indirect rule', which left a great deal of power in the hands of the traditional authorities.
If the world eventually came to know these islands, it was largely thanks to the cinema. The almost unreal beauty of their lagoons drew Hollywood twice with the same story: 'The Blue Lagoon', first in the 1949 version and then in the famous 1980 one, directed by Randal Kleiser and starring a very young Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins. The 1980 film was shot over four months on Nanuya Levu, a private island in the Yasawas now known as Turtle Island, with an Australian crew and help from the people of the neighbouring islands. The film even left an unexpected scientific legacy: after seeing the iguanas on screen, the herpetologist John Gibbons travelled to the island and in 1981 described a species new to science, the Fiji crested iguana (Brachylophus vitiensis). Another nearby location, the Sawa-i-Lau caves, became linked to the story for good. That is why the whole north of the archipelago is sold today under the 'Blue Lagoon' brand.
Yet while audiences around the world dreamed of these beaches, actually setting foot on them was nearly impossible. Until 1987 the Fijian government kept the Yasawas closed to land-based tourism. Local chiefs did not want accommodation on their islands, so visitors arriving on the cruise ships that had sailed the chain since the 1950s had to sleep on board and could only go ashore by day. The policy protected the cultural and natural integrity of the islands for decades, but it also kept them out of development.
One pioneer got there before everyone else: in 1980 the American Richard Evanson opened Turtle Island, on Nanuya Levu, as an exclusive retreat, starting a model of low-impact tourism run in partnership with the communities. Only in 1987 was the general ban lifted, and the Yasawas finally opened up to accommodation on land.
The 1987 opening, the same year (and not by chance) as the first military coups of independent Fiji, changed life in the Yasawas. Fiji had become independent from the United Kingdom on 10 October 1970, exactly 96 years after cession, first as a dominion and later as a republic. The country's politics were turbulent for decades, with several coups (1987, 2000, 2006) shaped by tensions between the iTaukei and Indo-Fijian communities. Far from Suva, though, the Yasawas found in tourism a livelihood of their own.
In the three decades after 1987, small boutique resorts flourished and, above all, backpacker lodges owned and run by the villages themselves, which let islanders keep a real share of the business. The arrival of the Yasawa Flyer catamaran, which runs up and down the chain once a day, and of the Bula Pass system made island hopping affordable: today a backpacker and a luxury guest can travel on the same boat.
Today the Yasawas live in a delicate balance. On one side, life is still anchored in the vanua, the sevusevu, Sunday service at the Methodist church and subsistence fishing. On the other, the economy relies more and more on visitors who come to swim with manta rays, explore Sawa-i-Lau or simply float in the Blue Lagoon. Cyclones, such as the devastating Winston of 2016, and climate change threaten these low-lying islands and their reefs. Travelling through them with respect (asking permission before entering villages, looking after the coral, supporting local businesses) is the best way to keep 'the Fiji half the world dreams of' real for the people who live there.
