Savusavu is the gateway to the less touristy side of Fiji: a one-street town looking out over a deep, sheltered bay, with sailboats at anchor, a colourful market and green hills tumbling into the sea. It sits on the south coast of Vanua Levu, the second-largest island in the archipelago, a short flight from Nadi but light years away from the bustle of Denarau and the Mamanucas. There are no big resorts or foam parties here: instead there are hot springs bubbling up between the houses, the country's first black pearl farm, and some of Fiji's best dive sites just around the corner.
The "hidden harbour" nickname isn't marketing: Savusavu Bay is a flooded volcanic crater, a natural anchorage that since the 19th century has drawn sandalwood, sea cucumber and copra traders, and that today is a refuge for yachts crossing the Pacific. That same volcanic activity feeds the famous Nakama hot springs, where locals still cook taro and cassava by dropping them into the boiling water. It's a place where real Fijian life and tourism coexist without pretence.
This guide covers Savusavu with a practical eye: how to get there (Fiji Link flight or Goundar ferry), what to see in town and around it, where to dive —from the bay and Split Rock to the gem that is the Namena Marine Reserve—, how the visit to the J. Hunter pearl farm works, and where to stay, from the iconic Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort to the guesthouses in the centre. It also honours its history: that of the Cakaudrove chiefs, the 19th-century copra planters and the girmitiyas who changed the face of Fiji forever.
Savusavu Bay is a flooded volcanic crater that for centuries was the territory of the iTaukei of Cakaudrove, one of Fiji's three great chiefly confederacies. In the first half of the 19th century its harbour became a centre of the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trade, and from the 1860s Australian and New Zealand settlers set up coconut plantations around it: Savusavu became a major copra centre until the Great Depression sank prices in the 1930s. Like the rest of Fiji, it came under British rule with the 1874 cession signed by Cakobau, and its economy became intertwined with the arrival of the girmitiyas, the Indian indentured labourers brought in between 1879 and 1916. Today it lives off black pearls, diving and eco-tourism. 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.
Read the history of Vanua Levu, Taveuni and the outer islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In Savusavu the ground breathes. Walk a few minutes from the main street and you'll find columns of steam rising between the houses, and pools of water boiling at almost a hundred degrees where locals, as they have for generations, lower bundles of taro and cassava to cook them without fire. These are the Nakama hot springs, living proof that the whole town sits on a dormant volcano. The deep, sheltered bay that made it famous — the "hidden harbour" where yachts crossing the Pacific drop anchor — is nothing more than a volcanic crater flooded by the sea.
That geology shapes the history of the place. Vanua Levu, Fiji's second island, is an archipelago within the archipelago: jungle-covered mountains, jagged coastlines and a sharp divide between the wet southern side, where Savusavu lies, and the dry north around Labasa. On that geography rest millennia of iTaukei life, centuries of trade, colonial plantations and, finally, the quiet town of pearls and diving we know today.
To understand Savusavu you have to look beyond the postcard: behind the hot springs and the black-lip oysters lies a story of Lapita seafarers, powerful chiefdoms, sandalwood traders, copra settlers and workers brought from India who changed the face of Fiji forever.
The first to reach these shores were the people of the Lapita culture, the extraordinary Pacific navigators who, some three thousand years ago, settled Fiji as part of the great Austronesian expansion into eastern Oceania. They are recognised by their pottery with stamped geometric patterns, found at sites all over the archipelago. From those first settlers descend the iTaukei, the Indigenous Fijians, whose society is still organised today around the mataqali (the lineage-based clan), the vanua (the unbreakable bond between people, their land and their ancestors) and respect for the chief.
Over the centuries, Vanua Levu and neighbouring Taveuni came under the sway of one of Fiji's most powerful confederacies of chiefdoms: Cakaudrove, whose paramount chief holds the title Tui Cakau. Savusavu and its coast are part of that traditional territory. Together with Bau and Rewa on Viti Levu, Cakaudrove was one of the great centres of power in pre-colonial Fiji, in a world of alliances, tribute, strategic marriages and wars between chiefdoms.
Life revolved around growing taro and yams, fishing, and yaqona or kava — the root used to make the ceremonial drink that seals every agreement and every welcome. The sevusevu protocol, presenting a bundle of kava to the chief on arriving in a village, is still observed in the communities of the area and is the key to visiting places like the Vuadomo waterfall respectfully.
The first sustained contact with Europeans came through trade, not tourism, and it was greedy. In the early 19th century Vanua Levu was known as "Sandalwood Island": merchant ships from Europe, the United States and Australia put into its bays — Savusavu among them — to load the prized fragrant wood, which sold for a fortune in Asian markets. When the sandalwood ran out, the business shifted to bêche-de-mer, dried sea cucumber that was also traded with China. Savusavu's natural harbour, that flooded and sheltered crater, was an ideal anchorage for those dealings.
Around the 1860s a new wave arrived: settlers from Australia and New Zealand who bought or leased land and planted coconut palms around Savusavu. The product was copra — the dried flesh of the coconut, from which oil is extracted — and for decades it drove the economy of Vanua Levu's south coast. Savusavu became a major copra centre, with its storage shed (the Copra Shed, today the marina and the social heart of the town) and a community of planters who, mixing with Fijian families, gave rise to a mixed-heritage elite that prospered from the trade.
The boom didn't last forever. The Great Depression of the 1930s sank the international price of copra and hit Savusavu hard. But the landscape was marked for good: the rows of coconut palms that still line the coast are the living trace of that century of plantations.
While Savusavu traded copra, the political fate of the archipelago was being decided elsewhere in Fiji. After decades of wars between chiefdoms, pressure from foreign settlers and unpayable debts, chief Seru Epenisa Cakobau — whom the foreign powers recognised as "king" of Fiji — ended up ceding sovereignty to Great Britain. On 10 October 1874, aboard HMS Pearl anchored off Levuka, Cakobau and twelve other paramount chiefs signed the Deed of Cession, the document that made Fiji a British colony under Queen Victoria. Cakaudrove and Vanua Levu were absorbed into the new colonial administration.
The decision that transformed Fiji most came shortly after. To make the colony profitable without dismantling iTaukei society — the first governor, Arthur Gordon, banned the use of Fijians as plantation labour — the British brought in workers from India under indenture contracts. The first ship, the Leonidas, arrived in 1879 with 463 people; between that year and 1916 some 60,000 Indian workers arrived. They called their contract girmit (a corruption of the English word agreement) and themselves girmitiyas.
Conditions were brutal: gruelling days in the cane fields, punishments, overcrowding and abuses that over the years sparked outcry in India itself. The indenture system was only abolished in 1916-1919. Many girmitiyas stayed on when their contracts ended, and their descendants — the Indo-Fijians — came to make up nearly half the country's population, bringing Hindi, Hinduism, Islam and a cuisine that is now an essential part of Fijian identity. In Savusavu, you can taste that legacy in every curry on the main street.
Fiji regained its sovereignty on 10 October 1970 — exactly 96 years after the cession — becoming an independent nation within the Commonwealth. The following decades brought tensions between the iTaukei and Indo-Fijian communities and a series of coups (1987, 2000, 2006) that shook national politics, though Savusavu, far from the capital, kept to its unhurried pace as a former copra town finding a new role.
That reinvention was the big change of recent decades. With copra in decline, Savusavu found new engines. Fiji's first black pearl farm, J. Hunter Pearls, set up in its clean-water bay and made the black-lip oyster a local emblem. Diving put the area on the world map, with the Namena Marine Reserve and soft coral reefs close at hand. And yachts crossing the Pacific turned the Copra Shed — the old restored warehouse — into a marina and yacht club. Resorts such as Jean-Michel Cousteau, founded by the son of legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, bet on nature and conservation tourism.
Today Savusavu is a small, multicultural town of around five thousand people: iTaukei Fijians, Indo-Fijians, descendants of planters and an international community that has put down roots. It still lives off the sea and the land, but also off showing its corner of Fiji just as it is, without artifice. The Nakama springs still boil, kava still seals every welcome, and the crater bay still shelters boats as it did two centuries ago. The business has changed; the hidden harbour is still the same.
