Fakarava
Interesting facts
- Fakarava is the second-largest atoll in the Tuamotus after Rangiroa, and also goes by the older names Havaiki-te-araro, Havai'i and Farea.
- The atoll is a coral cap about 150 metres thick sitting on a small volcanic seamount that rises some 1,170 metres from the ocean floor.
- That underlying volcano formed roughly 54 to 60 million years ago, long before the reef that now rings the lagoon began to grow.
- The Pōmare dynasty, which went on to rule Tahiti, is said to have originated on Fakarava.
- Bellingshausen, the first European to record the atoll in 1820, named it Wittgenstein Island; the French navigator Dumont d'Urville called in 1838.
- Catholic missionary Honoré Laval evangelised the atoll in 1849, and the church at Tetamanu, dating from 1874, was built of coral.
- In 2014 Laurent Ballesta's Gombessa expedition counted some 18,000 camouflage groupers gathering to spawn in the southern pass at the June and July full moons.
- A follow-up Gombessa expedition in 2017 studied how the grey reef sharks of the southern pass organise themselves and hunt together as a pack at night.
- The southern pass has been protected since 2008, making it one of the few reefs where sharks still gather in something like their historical numbers.
- Black-pearl farming is licensed over some 400 hectares of the lagoon in the northeast, near the village of Rotoava.
Why it is worth it
Fakarava is a ring of coral sand and reef some 60 km long and 21 km wide, enclosing a lagoon of more than 1,100 square kilometres in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. Seen from the air, it is a thin rectangle of palm-covered islets drawn around an inland sea whose colours shift from pale turquoise over the sand flats to deep blue in the middle. The land itself is barely above the water, just 24 square kilometres of it, which makes the atoll feel like the sea briefly decided to become shore.
What makes Fakarava exceptional is what happens at its two openings to the ocean. In the north, Garuae is the widest reef pass in French Polynesia, roughly 1.6 km across, and the tide pours through it in powerful currents that carry divers along walls of coral. In the south, the narrower Tumakohua pass beside the hamlet of Tetamanu is famous for its "wall of sharks": hundreds of grey reef sharks, by some counts up to 700, hold station in the current, one of the densest gatherings of the species known anywhere. Rays, turtles and great schools of reef fish fill the same water.
The atoll and its neighbours belong to a UNESCO biosphere reserve first created in 1977 and extended to Fakarava in 2016, a recognition of how intact these reef and lagoon systems remain. The human story is quieter. The first European record of the atoll dates from 1820, by the Russian navigator Fabian von Bellingshausen, and Robert FitzRoy sailed past aboard the Beagle in 1835. Tetamanu, once the administrative seat for the Tuamotu, is now a handful of houses, while life has shifted to Rotoava in the northeast, home to most of the atoll's roughly 840 people.
Above water, the pleasures are simple: long white-sand shores fringed with coconut palms, still lagoon shallows, and small guesthouses scattered along the shore near Rotoava.
Getting there
Fakarava lies about 440 km northeast of Papeete on Tahiti. Fakarava Airport (FAV), about 29 km from the atoll's centre, has regular Air Tahiti flights from Papeete taking a little over an hour. From Rotoava, the southern pass and Tetamanu are reached by boat, roughly an hour's ride across the lagoon.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Fakarava, Havaiki-te-araro, Havai'i or Farea is an atoll in the west of the Tuamotu group in French Polynesia. It is the second largest of the Tuamotu atolls. The nearest land is Toau, a coral atoll which lies 14 kilometres to the northwest.
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