Nananu-i-Ra is the simple, unpretentious getaway that many people look for in Fiji and few find: a small island of green hills and eight beaches, just 3 km off the north coast of Viti Levu, with no cars, no roads and no five-star resorts. You get there by bus to Rakiraki, a taxi to Ellington Wharf and a short boat ride across the channel. On the other side you'll find a handful of family-run places to stay, turquoise water, reefs a few metres from the shore and a pace that makes you slow right down.
Its trademark is the wind. The trade winds that blow from April to October make Nananu-i-Ra one of the best spots in Fiji for windsurfing and kitesurfing, and the steady conditions draw riders from all over the world. You don't need to do wind sports to have a good time, though. You can snorkel and dive among the corals, kayak between the bays, hike the hills for views of Viti Levu and the sea, or do absolutely nothing on beaches like the award-winning Oni Beach. Its name in Fijian means something like 'dream of the west'.
This guide takes you to Nananu-i-Ra with practical details: how to link up the Sunbeam bus, the taxi and the boat, what the transfer costs, where to stay in the island's historic cottages (such as those of the Macdonald or Betham families), when the winds arrive for kiting and windsurfing, and what to do on calm days. It's a destination for backpacks, wind and beaches, where you can truly switch off on Fiji's Suncoast.
Nananu-i-Ra is a small island in Ra Province whose name means 'dream of the west' in Fijian. In iTaukei mythology it was the place from which the souls of the dead set off for the afterlife. Its original inhabitants were decimated by disease and tribal wars in the 19th century, and much of its land ended up being sold to Fijians of European descent, which explains its small, mixed population today. Across the water on the mainland, the Rakiraki area is linked to the feared warrior chief Udre Udre. Throughout the 19th century the whole region went through wars between chiefdoms, the arrival of traders and missionaries, the Cession of Fiji to Britain in 1874 and then the era of sugar-cane plantations worked by indentured labourers from India (girmitiyas, 1879-1916). Today Nananu-i-Ra lives on quiet tourism and wind sports. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The other Fiji, wilder and more remote. It takes in Vanua Levu, the second-largest island, with laid-back, bohemian Savusavu; lush Taveuni, the "garden island", which the 180th meridian crosses; the reefs of Kadavu; and Levuka, the old capital and the country's only World Heritage Site.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became a paradise for backpackers and windsurfers, Nananu-i-Ra was a threshold between this world and the next. In the iTaukei worldview, the little island off the northern coast of Viti Levu was the point from which the souls of the dead, once freed from the body, began their journey to the afterlife. It is no coincidence that its Fijian name translates as something like 'daydream of the west': the west, where the sun sets, was the direction of the spirits in many Pacific cultures. That symbolic weight makes Nananu-i-Ra a much older and deeper place than its laid-back present of beaches and wind suggests.
Today the island has a permanent population of just a few dozen people, a mix of residents of European descent and local workers, and it lives off quiet tourism. But that unusual demographic make-up is no accident: it is the scar of a hard history. The original inhabitants of Nananu-i-Ra were decimated by diseases brought by Europeans and by the wars between chiefdoms in the 19th century, and much of their land ended up being sold to Fijians of European descent. To understand how that came about, you have to go back to the settlement of Fiji itself and to the upheavals that shook the whole archipelago.
Fiji was settled around 1000 BC by seafarers of the Lapita culture, heirs to a great Austronesian expansion that had set out from the area of Taiwan and the Philippines and moved from island to island across Melanesia until it reached western Polynesia. Archaeologists place the first settlement of the archipelago some 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, recognisable by the distinctive stamp-decorated Lapita pottery. The iTaukei, the Indigenous Fijians, descend from those first seafarers, and over the centuries they built a complex society organised into mataqali (clans), yavusa and confederations of chiefdoms, bound to the land and to the ancestors by the concept of vanua, with kava (yaqona) and meke at the heart of ceremonial life.
The northern coast of Viti Levu, today's Ra Province, which faces Nananu-i-Ra, was a region of warrior chiefdoms. The best-remembered figure is the chief Ratu Udre Udre, from the Rakiraki area, whom tradition and some accounts by early Europeans describe as a fearsome warlord: his tomb, near Rakiraki, is still shown to visitors as part of local history. It was a world of shifting alliances, wars between confederations and a power measured in land, people and prestige. From the 19th century onwards, a wave of foreigners that would change everything broke over that dense, organised world.
The first Europeans to stay in Fiji were neither settlers nor officials, but beachcombers: castaways, deserters and escaped convicts who lived with Indigenous communities, learned their language and customs, and acted as go-betweens with the captains who arrived to trade. The first big business was sandalwood, the fragrant timber that fetched a fortune in China; when it ran out, around the 1820s and 1830s, trade shifted to bêche-de-mer, the sea cucumber that, dried and smoked, was also sold to China as a delicacy. That trade, which mobilised entire villages and brought in firearms in exchange, upset the balance of power between the chiefdoms.
It was against this backdrop that Ratu Seru Cakobau rose to power, the mighty chief of Bau, the little island off the eastern coast of Viti Levu that became the most influential political centre in the archipelago. Cakobau went as far as proclaiming himself Tui Viti, 'King of Fiji', although his real authority over the whole country was always contested. Meanwhile, on the island of Ovalau, the port of Levuka was growing into the first permanent European settlement and commercial capital, a hive of traders, missionaries and consuls. Introduced diseases — measles, among others — caused devastating epidemics that, together with the wars, emptied entire communities. Small, exposed islands like Nananu-i-Ra were among the hardest hit: when their original population collapsed, the void opened the door to the land sales that would shape their future.
Growing chaos — Cakobau's debts to American claimants, wars between chiefdoms, European settlers setting up makeshift governments and laying claim to land — pushed things towards a drastic solution. On 10 October 1874, at Nasova next to Levuka, Ratu Seru Cakobau and other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession that transferred the sovereignty of Fiji to Great Britain. Fiji became a Crown colony, and the new colonial government would move the capital from Levuka to the roomier Suva in 1882.
The British administration transformed the economy through plantations, above all sugar cane, and to work them it brought in indentured labour from India. On 14 May 1879 the ship Leonidas landed at Levuka with 463 Indian workers: the first of more than 60,000 who would arrive up to 1916. They were the girmitiyas, a word that comes from girmit, a corruption of the English 'agreement', the contract that bound them to five years of work in often miserable conditions, housed in barracks known as 'coolie lines'. The northern coast of Viti Levu, including the Ra region facing Nananu-i-Ra, was cane country, and that forced migration gave rise to the Indo-Fijian community that is today a central part of the country's identity, economy and culture; the Hindu temples around Rakiraki bear witness to that heritage.
Amid all these ups and downs, Nananu-i-Ra followed its own minor but revealing path: with its original population wiped out by disease and war, its land passed into the hands of families of European descent, a pattern seen on several small Fijian islands and one that explains why the island today has such a small, mixed community, so different from the iTaukei villages on the mainland.
Fiji remained a British colony until 10 October 1970, when — almost exactly a century after the Cession, and on the same date — it gained independence. The young nation inherited the coexistence, not always easy, between iTaukei and Indo-Fijians, a tension that would mark its later political history. But while the big political battles were fought out in Suva, islands like Nananu-i-Ra found a new and peaceful calling: tourism.
From the last decades of the 20th century, the little Suncoast island became known among backpackers and, above all, among windsurfers, who discovered that the south-east trade winds blew there with exceptional consistency from April to October. Family-run cottages — such as those of the Macdonald and Betham families — gradually shaped a low-key destination, with no big resorts, where the draw was (and still is) the eight beaches, snorkelling straight off the shore, kayaking and the wind. When kitesurfing joined windsurfing, Nananu-i-Ra established itself as one of the best spots in Fiji for wind sports.
And so the island from which the souls of the dead set out is today a place to unplug: no cars, no ATMs, no rush. Its history sums up, on a small scale, that of all Fiji: the Lapita settlement, the world of the iTaukei chiefdoms, the jolt of the beachcombers and the sandalwood and sea cucumber trade, the epidemics, the Cession to Great Britain, the era of plantations and girmitiyas, and finally independence and reinvention through tourism. Setting foot on Nananu-i-Ra with a board under your arm means, without realising it, walking over all those layers of history.
