Moorea
Interesting facts
- Mount Mouaputa has a hole right through its summit; according to legend, the hero Pai hurled his spear through it from Tahiti to stop thieves from stealing a mountain.
- The name Moʻorea means 'yellow lizard' in Tahitian; earlier Europeans knew the island as Aimeo or Eimeo.
- The Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, sailing for Spain, was the first European to sight the island, in 1606.
- In 1774 the Spanish captain Domingo de Bonechea called at the island and named it Santo Domingo.
- Native Partula tree snails were largely wiped out after the predatory rosy wolf snail was introduced to the island in 1977.
- An endemic songbird, the Moorea reed warbler, was last recorded on the island in the 1980s.
- Many exterior scenes of the 1984 film The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, were shot in Opunohu Bay.
- The octagonal Protestant church at Papetoai, founded by the London Missionary Society in the 1820s on a former marae, was rebuilt in the late 19th century.
- More than 500 species of reef fish live around the island, and humpback whales pass by between July and October.
Why it is worth it
Moʻorea rises from the sea 17 km north-west of Tahiti, and seen from its larger neighbour it is a jagged silhouette of spires and saw-toothed ridges. The island is what remains of a shield volcano that was active between about 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago. Erosion has since carved the old crater into a ring of steep peaks, the highest of which, Mount Tohivea, reaches 1,207 metres, and a coral reef encircles the whole island, enclosing a lagoon of shallow, luminous water in every shade of turquoise. The island covers about 134 square kilometres.
The north coast is cut by two deep bays, Cook's Bay and Opunohu Bay, separated by the sharp mass of Mount Rotui. They are among the most beautiful anchorages in the South Pacific: steep green walls drop to calm water, and the peaks are reflected on still mornings. The irony of their names is that James Cook anchored not in the bay that bears his name, but in neighbouring Opunohu, in 1777. The classic view is from the Belvédère lookout on the slopes above, where both bays open out on either side of Rotui. Inland, the valleys are planted with pineapples and vanilla, the island's traditional crops.
Moʻorea also has a scientific role out of proportion to its size. The University of California, Berkeley runs a research station here, and between 2008 and 2010 the Moorea Biocode Project catalogued more than 5,700 species across the island's land and sea, an attempt to document a whole tropical island's life. For the visitor, the lagoon is the other half of the island: below the surface lie coral gardens and sand flats, while above it the black volcanic peaks keep the skyline.
Getting there
Moʻorea has its own small airport, Moorea Temae Airport (MOZ), on the north-east coast, with flights of around five minutes from Tahiti. The main gateway is Faaʻa, on Tahiti, about 23 km away across the channel, where the international airport for French Polynesia is located. Most visitors cross by ferry from Papeete to the Vaiare wharf on Moʻorea; the crossing takes roughly 30 to 50 minutes.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Moʼorea, also spelled Moorea, is a volcanic island in French Polynesia lying 17 kilometres (11 mi) northwest of Tahiti. Moʼorea and Tahiti are the largest members of the Windward Islands, a group that is part of the larger Society Islands archipelago.
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