Flores is one of those islands that win over anyone looking for a more authentic, less crowded Indonesia. Long, mountainous and green, it stretches across the east of the archipelago like a spine of volcanoes and valleys, dotted with villages where life still follows ancient traditions. Its name, Portuguese for 'flowers' and given by the sailors who named it, hints at a lush island. Most people are Catholic, which is rare in Muslim-majority Indonesia, and the island has an identity of its own, woven from dozens of local languages and cultures.
Its most famous jewel is Kelimutu volcano. At its summit are three crater lakes that change colour, from turquoise to green and from black to reddish, depending on the minerals and gases. Local cultures believe the lakes are where the souls of the dead go. Watching the sun rise over these lakes through the mist is one of the most magical experiences in Indonesia. But Flores has much more. It is the gateway to Komodo National Park, with its dragons and coral waters. There are the cone-shaped houses of Wae Rebo, hidden in the mountains, the ancestral villages of Bena, and the incredible spiderweb rice fields around Ruteng.
This guide helps you explore an island that takes time and a taste for adventure. It covers getting there and around on the slow Trans-Flores Highway, planning the climb to Kelimutu from Moni and combining Flores with Komodo from Labuan Bajo. It also shows which villages, rice fields and volcanoes you shouldn't miss. Flores is not a quick, comfortable getaway. It is a place of vast landscapes, living culture and genuine encounters, and one of the great secrets of eastern Indonesia.
Flores has been inhabited since very ancient times. In the Liang Bua cave, researchers found the remains of Homo floresiensis, a small human species nicknamed 'the hobbit' that lived on the island tens of thousands of years ago. Austronesian peoples settled the island later, organised in clans and villages, with megalithic cultures and many languages. In the early 16th century the Portuguese arrived. They named it 'Cabo das Flores' and brought Catholicism, especially to the east (Larantuka, Sikka), and that religious mark remains today. Later, the Dutch East Indies took the island into its colonial empire. After Indonesia's independence in 1945, it became part of the province of East Nusa Tenggara. For a long time it was a remote, poor island. In recent decades, the boom around Komodo and Kelimutu opened it up to tourism, although it keeps a strong traditional and Catholic character. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The arc of islands east of Bali: Lombok and the Sasak, the Komodo dragons, Catholic Flores with its prehistoric 'hobbit', and Wallace's biological frontier.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few places in the world can claim to have changed what we thought we knew about human evolution. Flores is one of them. In 2003, in the Liang Bua cave in the west of the island, a team of Indonesian and Australian archaeologists unearthed the remains of an unknown human species: adults barely a metre tall, with small brains, who lived on Flores tens of thousands of years ago. They named it Homo floresiensis, although the world soon knew it by its nickname: 'the hobbit', a nod to Tolkien's creatures.
The discovery was a scientific bombshell. It suggested that a human form different from our own had survived on this isolated island until a surprisingly recent time, perhaps living alongside other dwarf or giant animals shaped by island isolation, such as a species of dwarf elephant (Stegodon) that they also hunted. The exact origin of the 'hobbit' and its relationship to other human species are still debated, but its existence made Flores a key place for understanding the prehistory of our species.
Long after those first inhabitants disappeared, the island was settled by Austronesian peoples, the ancestors of most of today's inhabitants. They arrived by sea thousands of years ago, bringing farming, seafaring and the languages from which the dozens of tongues spoken on Flores today derive. Over that ancient backdrop, the island's rich cultural diversity was gradually woven.
Before the Europeans arrived, Flores was not a unified kingdom but a mosaic of peoples and cultures, each with its own language, customs and territory. From west to east lived — and still live — the Manggarai, Ngada, Ende, Lio, Sikka, Lamaholot and other groups, organised into clans and villages that were often at odds with one another. The island's geography, with its mountains and isolated valleys, encouraged this fragmentation and explains its astonishing linguistic diversity: several mutually unintelligible languages are spoken on a single island.
Many of these cultures kept megalithic traditions: the use of large stones for altars, tombs and ritual monuments dedicated to the ancestors. You can still see them today in villages such as Bena, near Bajawa, where menhirs and dolmens surround sacred structures — the 'ngadhu' and 'bhaga' — representing the clan's male and female ancestors. Life revolved around ancestor worship, rice farming and the rituals that kept the balance with the forces of nature.
That bond with the ancestors and the afterlife also shaped the landscape. On the Kelimutu volcano, the Lio people saw — and still see — in its three coloured lakes the destination of the souls of the dead: one lake for the young, another for the old, and another for evil spirits. Even today, this cosmology coexists with Christianity, showing how deep Flores's traditional beliefs run.
The turning point that made Flores a unique island within Indonesia came in the early 16th century with the Portuguese navigators. Searching for the spices of the Moluccas, the Portuguese sailed these waters and named the eastern cape of the island 'Cabo das Flores' ('cape of flowers'), a name that ended up applying to the whole island. They set up trading posts and, above all, brought Catholicism with them, which Dominican missionaries began to spread, especially in eastern Flores, in areas such as Larantuka and the neighbouring island of Solor.
That evangelisation, carried on for centuries, took root with a strength it had almost nowhere else in Indonesia. Flores is still mostly Catholic today, a striking case in the country with the most Muslims in the world. The legacy is visible everywhere: churches in every village, Christian names, processions and, above all, the famous Holy Week of Larantuka (the 'Portuguese' Holy Week), one of the oldest and most moving religious celebrations in Asia, with images and rites inherited from those first missionaries.
Portuguese rule was in fact limited and contested. Over time, the colonial power that prevailed in the region was the Dutch: first the Dutch East India Company and later the colonial state gradually pushed out the Portuguese, who in the mid-19th century ceded their rights over Flores to the Netherlands. Even so, the Catholic seed and the island's name remained as a lasting legacy of that first encounter with Europe.
Under Dutch rule, Flores became part of the vast Dutch East Indies, although, like many remote islands in the east of the archipelago, it remained a peripheral and underdeveloped land in the eyes of the colonial administration. The Dutch exercised indirect control, relying on local chiefs, and the island largely kept its traditional structures of clans and villages. The most consistent work was perhaps that of the Catholic missions, which founded churches, schools and hospitals and strengthened the weight of Catholicism, especially after the arrival of the missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word in the late 19th century.
The Second World War brought the Japanese occupation of the Indies, which collapsed with Japan's surrender in 1945. That same year, the nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia's independence in Jakarta, and after years of conflict with the Dutch, the new country's sovereignty was recognised in 1949. Flores then became part of the Republic of Indonesia, later included in the province of East Nusa Tenggara, together with other mostly Christian islands in the south-east of the archipelago.
In the following decades, Flores remained one of the most remote and least resourced areas of the country, hit hard as well by its volcanic and seismic nature: in 1992, a powerful earthquake and the tsunami it triggered killed thousands of people in the east of the island, one of the worst disasters in its recent history. Modernisation came slowly, with difficult roads and an economy based mainly on farming and fishing.
In recent decades, Flores has gone from a forgotten corner to one of Indonesia's most appealing emerging destinations. Two big draws largely explain the change. On one side, Komodo National Park, created in 1980 to protect the famous dragons and listed as a World Heritage Site, whose gateway is Labuan Bajo, in the west of the island. On the other, the Kelimutu volcano and its coloured lakes, in the centre, which attract travellers from all over the world willing to get up early for its magical sunrise.
The Komodo boom turned Labuan Bajo from a fishing village into a fast-growing tourist port, with an expanded airport, hotels, phinisi cruises and heavy — sometimes controversial — investment from the Indonesian government, which has made Flores one of its priority destinations. That growth brought jobs and opportunities, but also tensions: fee increases in the park, debates about the impact on local communities and on the wildlife itself, and the challenge of growing without destroying what makes the island special.
Today Flores offers a rare balance: spectacular nature — volcanoes, coral seas, dragons —, traditional cultures that are very much alive — the conical houses of Wae Rebo, recognised by UNESCO; the megalithic Ngada villages; the spiderweb rice fields — and a unique Catholic identity. It is still an island of slow roads and limited comforts outside Labuan Bajo, and precisely for that reason it keeps a genuine character that many travellers are looking for. For those with time and a sense of adventure, Flores is one of the great treasures of eastern Indonesia.
