French Polynesia

Polynesian voyagers settled these islands between roughly 1000 and 1300 AD, navigating by stars, swell, and birds. The Society and Marquesas groups were launch points for the wider settlement of the Pacific, including Hawaii, New Zealand, and Rapa Nui. European ships arrived in the eighteenth century — Wallis, Bougainville, and Cook — and with them disease that cut the population sharply.

In the early nineteenth century the Pōmare family, backed by London Missionary Society preachers, unified Tahiti as a Christian kingdom. France imposed a protectorate in 1842, annexed the kingdom in 1880, and had taken the other island groups by 1901. During the Second World War the United States built a base on Bora Bora. The territory gained French citizenship in 1946 and the name French Polynesia in 1957.

From 1966 to 1996 France carried out 193 nuclear tests, atmospheric and then underground, at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the Tuamotus, with lasting health and environmental consequences and a long campaign for recognition and compensation. A series of statutes has widened self-government since the 1980s, and politics is split between autonomist parties and a pro-independence movement led for decades by Oscar Temaru; the United Nations put the territory back on its decolonisation list in 2013, over French objections, and a pro-independence government took office in 2023.

Mā'ohi (Polynesian) culture is strong and, since the 1980s, resurgent. Tahitian and the other island languages are widely spoken; tattooing — the English word comes from the Tahitian tatau — has been revived as an art and an identity; and 'ori tahiti dance, himene choral singing, and outrigger-canoe (va'a) racing, the national sport, draw huge participation. The Heiva festival each July is the showcase.

Church life, Protestant and Catholic, is central and layered over older belief and the idea of fenua, the land as homeland and identity. Marquesan carving and the tiki have been revived there. French language, administration, food, and holidays run through everything, and the pace is unhurried — the local word fiu, roughly "fed up" or "over it", is used affectionately for the island tempo.

About 280,000 people live in French Polynesia, roughly three-quarters of them on Tahiti, where Papeete is the only city. The outer islands steadily lose young people to Tahiti and to metropolitan France. The economy rests on high-end tourism, black-pearl farming in the Tuamotus, subsidised copra, and large transfers from the French state, which also funds health care and social benefits.

The cost of living is very high because nearly everything is shipped in. Land is often held undivided by extended families, which complicates development, and the western islands live with a cyclone risk. Daily life mixes French structures — schools, the mairie, the supermarket — with fishing, gardening, church, and the lagoon.

Poisson cru (ia ota) — raw tuna marinated in lime and bathed in coconut milk with cucumber and tomato — is the national dish, eaten everywhere. The ahima'a earth oven produces feast food: suckling pig, breadfruit ('uru), taro, and fāfā (chicken with taro leaves). Grilled and raw reef fish and tuna are everyday fare, and firi firi, figure-of-eight coconut doughnuts, are the breakfast treat.

French bread, subsidised and delivered daily even to small islands, and French patisserie are staples, and the roulottes — food trucks that gather on the Papeete waterfront each evening — serve steak-frites, chow mein, grilled fish, and crêpes. Tahitian vanilla, grown mainly on Taha'a, is world-renowned, and Hinano is the local beer.

Bora Bora is the emblem: a jewel-coloured lagoon around the peaks of Otemanu and Pahia, ringed by motu with overwater resorts, and snorkelling and diving with rays and reef sharks. Neighbouring Mo'orea, a short ferry from Tahiti, has the deep bays of Cook and 'Ōpūnohu, the Belvédère lookout, pineapple fields, and winter whale-watching.

Tahiti itself offers the Papeete market, the Museum of Tahiti and Her Islands, waterfalls in the Fautaua and Papenoo valleys, black-sand beaches, and the legendary reef-break of Teahupo'o, which hosted the surfing at the 2024 Olympics. The Tuamotu atolls of Rangiroa and Fakarava are among the world's great dives, drifting the passes with sharks in their hundreds.

Raiatea holds Taputapuātea, a UNESCO-listed marae complex that was the religious and political heart of eastern Polynesia; Huahine is quiet and lush; and Taha'a is scented with vanilla. Far to the northeast, the Marquesas rise sheer from the ocean with no protecting lagoon — dramatic, thinly peopled islands of giant tiki, the last home of the painter Gauguin and the singer Jacques Brel, reached by the Aranui voyage.