Komodo Island
Interesting facts
- W. Douglas Burden's 1926 expedition to catch Komodo dragons helped inspire the 1933 film King Kong.
- Burden brought back twelve preserved dragons and two live ones; three of his mounted specimens are still shown at the American Museum of Natural History.
- In the Komodo language the dragons are called sebae, meaning twins, from a traditional belief that people and dragons share the same spiritual mother.
- About 1,700 Komodo dragons live on the island, the largest population of any island in the national park.
- A Komodo dragon can eat up to 80 percent of its own body weight in a single meal.
- Female Komodo dragons can reproduce without a male: at Chester Zoo a female named Flora laid eggs that hatched without fertilisation.
- English, French and Portuguese charts of the late 1700s and early 1800s already marked the island as Comodo.
- Komodo National Park was founded in 1980 specifically to protect the dragons and covers 1,733 square kilometres, most of it sea.
- The island covers about 291 square kilometres, and the Komodo people's own language is now considered endangered.
- In 2011 Komodo National Park was named one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature in a worldwide public vote.
Why it is worth it
Komodo is a hilly island between Sumbawa and Flores in the Lesser Sunda chain of eastern Indonesia, and it gave its name to the largest lizard on Earth. The Komodo dragon, a monitor lizard that lives only here, on a few neighbouring islands and in part of western Flores, was known locally long before outsiders heard of it; Dutch colonial officers on Flores picked up reports of a "land crocodile" in the early 1900s, and a lieutenant, Steyn van Hensbroek, landed on the island and killed one to examine it. By 1915 the colonial government had already issued a regulation protecting the animals.
The island belongs to the Lesser Sundas deciduous forest ecoregion. Besides the dragons, it holds Javan deer (introduced, and a mainstay of the dragons' diet), water buffalo, wild pigs, macaques and cockatoos. The surrounding sea is part of the Coral Triangle, among the richest marine regions on the planet, which is why the waters around Komodo draw divers as much as the land draws naturalists.
In 1991 Komodo was included in Komodo National Park, which was inscribed as a World Heritage Site the same year and is also a biosphere reserve. People live here too: about 1,800 inhabitants in 2020, mostly in Komodo village, descendants of the island's original Komodo people mixed with Bugis settlers from Sulawesi and others.
Getting there
Komodo is reached by boat from Labuan Bajo on the western tip of Flores, the gateway town to the national park; the island lies roughly 50 km from the town in a straight line. Komodo International Airport (LBJ) in Labuan Bajo has regular flights from Jakarta and other Indonesian cities. Sultan Muhammad Salahuddin Airport (BMU) at Bima on Sumbawa is about 85 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Padar Island 15.9 km · island
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Komodo is one of the 17,508 islands that comprise the Republic of Indonesia. It is particularly notable as the habitat of the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on Earth, which is named after the island. Komodo Island has a surface area of 291 square kilometres, and had a human population of about 1,800 in 2020.
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