Suva is the Fiji that almost no brochure shows: not the Fiji of turquoise islands, but a genuine tropical capital, humid and bustling, where stone colonial buildings, Hindu temples, mosques, churches, modest high-rises and the country's biggest market all sit side by side. It is the most multicultural city in the South Pacific, the political and academic heart of the whole region, and the best place to understand what Fiji is once resort mode is switched off: a young, proud, two-community nation, with rain always about to fall.
Set on a peninsula that juts out into the sea, Suva has been the capital since 1882, when the British moved the colonial government here from old Levuka. That era left gems such as the Grand Pacific Hotel, the Sacred Heart Cathedral and the government buildings, which give the Victoria Parade seafront the air of a faded but charming imperial port. A few blocks away, the municipal market overflows with taro, kava and spices, and the University of the South Pacific fills the city with students from twelve island nations.
You don't come to Suva for the beach (that's what the islands and the Coral Coast are for), but for its urban energy, its food (the best Indo-Fijian curry in the country, Chinese and Korean restaurants, trendy cafés), its museum and its green surroundings, such as the Colo-i-Suva forest. One or two days is enough to take its pulse: museum, market, colonial architecture, seafront and a Fiji Bitter beer while you watch the downpour. It is a must for anyone who wants the real Fiji, not just the postcard version.
Suva stands on iTaukei land of the Rewa people, on a peninsula that for centuries was home to villages and mangroves. Its fate changed when chief Cakobau ceded land in the area to the Polynesia Company in 1868 to settle debts, and above all when, after Fiji's cession to Great Britain in 1874, the British decided to move the capital here from Levuka in 1882. It went from village to colonial city, populated by iTaukei, Europeans and the growing Indo-Fijian community descended from the girmitiyas. It was the stage for independence in 1970 and for the coups that marked the country. All of that history, from kava to the coups, is told on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Fiji. The largest island in the archipelago holds both main cities: Suva, the biggest city in the South Pacific, and the tourist hub of Nadi. It also has the islet of Bau, from where King Cakobau unified the country, the sugar cane plantations of the west, and most of the iTaukei and Indo-Fijian population.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Suva is the only big city in Fiji you can walk through in a downpour while feeling the full weight of the country's history. It is the rainiest capital in the South Pacific, with about 3,000 millimetres a year and rain possible in any month. It is also the most crowded, the most multicultural and the most political. This is where Fiji's modern future was signed, where the flag of independence was raised and where the coups that shook the nation took place. But before all that, Suva was just a peninsula of mangroves and iTaukei villages that changed hands over an unpaid debt.
In the mid-19th century, the chief Seru Epenisa Cakobau, the powerful lord of the island of Bau who went as far as proclaiming himself Tui Viti ('king of Fiji'), had run up huge debts with foreign traders. Most of them were Americans demanding compensation. To pay them off, in 1868 he granted thousands of square kilometres of land to the Polynesia Company, an Australian firm, including a sizeable strip around present-day Suva. The settlers who came to grow sugar cane and cotton failed on the swampy soil, but the deal had huge consequences: on paper, an iTaukei peninsula was now in the hands of a colonial company. The stage was set for a new city.
In 1874, after years of instability, Cakobau and other chiefs ceded Fiji to Great Britain. On 10 October the Deed of Cession was signed at Nasova, near Levuka, and the archipelago became a British colony. The first capital was Levuka itself, the old whaling port on the island of Ovalau, a hive of traders, sailors and taverns. But Levuka had a fatal problem: it was squeezed between the sea and a steep mountain, with no room to grow.
The colonial administrators needed a capital with a future, and they set their sights on the Suva peninsula, which was flat and wide and had a good natural harbour on the southeast coast of Viti Levu. The decision was made in the late 1870s, and the government officially moved in 1882. Almost overnight, a patch of mangroves became the centre of colonial power in Fiji. Swamps were drained, straight streets were laid out facing the bay and the first stone buildings went up. Levuka, the old capital, was frozen in time, which is exactly why it is a World Heritage Site today. Suva, meanwhile, began to grow at a dizzying pace.
The new capital grew in step with the Empire. In 1902 the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral was consecrated, built from sandstone brought from Sydney. In 1909 the Carnegie library opened. In 1914 the Grand Pacific Hotel opened its doors, a white palace on the seafront built by the Union Steamship Company to house passengers from the steamers crossing the Pacific. In 1952 Suva was officially declared a city, the first in Fiji. The colonial architecture of Victoria Parade and the waterfront is still the city's most photogenic face today.
You can't understand Suva's story without the girmitiyas. Governor Arthur Gordon had decided to protect the iTaukei population from forced labour, so to get the sugar plantations producing, the colony brought in indentured workers from India. Between 1879 and 1916 more than 60,000 men and women arrived under the girmit system, bound to five years of gruelling work in the cane fields. The word girmit is a corruption of the English word 'agreement', the contract they signed. That is where the word girmitiya comes from, and with it a whole community was born.
When their contracts ended, many stayed. Their descendants, the Indo-Fijians, became traders, farmers, teachers and professionals, and Suva was their great city. That is why the capital has Hindu temples, mosques, sari shops, tailors and some of the best curry restaurants in the Pacific, all mixed in with Christian churches, iTaukei markets and colonial buildings. Today Suva is Fiji's most multicultural city: iTaukei, Indo-Fijians, Rotumans, Chinese, Europeans and students from a dozen island nations share its streets.
That cosmopolitan character deepened in 1968 with the founding of the University of the South Pacific (USP), set up on the Laucala campus on a former New Zealand air base. Supported by twelve island nations, the USP made Suva the intellectual capital of the whole region, the city where the Pacific does its thinking. Between the municipal market, the largest in the country with thousands of vendors, and the university's lecture halls, Suva brings together the two energies that define modern Fiji: tradition and youth.
On 10 October 1970, exactly 96 years after the cession, Fiji regained its independence, and it was in Suva that the Union Jack was lowered and the new flag raised. But the young nation also inherited the tension the colony had sown: a society divided between iTaukei and Indo-Fijians, with land and political power as the fault lines. That tension boiled over, and Suva was almost always where it happened.
In May 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka led the country's first coup, followed by a second in September, to make sure the government stayed in iTaukei hands rather than with a coalition where Indo-Fijians carried a lot of weight. In May 2000, the nationalist businessman George Speight and an armed group stormed Parliament in Suva. They held Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, the first Indo-Fijian head of government, and much of his cabinet hostage for 56 days. And in December 2006, military commander Frank Bainimarama overthrew Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase in the fourth recognised coup since independence. Each of these events played out in the streets and buildings of the capital.
After years of military rule, Fiji went back to the polls in 2014 and has been rebuilding its democracy ever since. Suva, meanwhile, kept growing. Its metropolitan area is now home to around 330,000 people, and it is by far the economic, political and cultural centre of the country. As the seat of government and home to the regional university, the biggest port and the biggest market, the capital packs in all of Fiji's contradictions and richness: colonial and modern, iTaukei and Indian, tense and welcoming, always under the rain. Walk through it, from the Fiji Museum to the market, from the Grand Pacific Hotel to a curry on Cumming Street, and you won't see postcard Fiji. You'll see something more valuable: the real Fiji.
