Raja Ampat Islands
Interesting facts
- Archaeological finds show that people first reached Raja Ampat more than 50,000 years ago, when Misool and Salawati were still joined by land to New Guinea.
- In that ice-age landscape, Waigeo and Batanta were not separate islands but formed a single island that researchers call Waitanta.
- The archipelago has at least three marine lakes filled with harmless jellyfish, all of them in the Misool area of the south.
- The surrounding waters are visited by blue, Bryde's, Omura's and sperm whales, as well as dugongs, whale sharks and even orcas.
- Lying between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Raja Ampat exchanges coral and fish larvae with both, one reason its reefs are so extraordinarily diverse.
- Zebra sharks here had dwindled to perhaps 20 individuals after decades of fishing; a breeding and release programme begun in 2022 aims to return 500 by 2032.
- Since 2019 local divers have culled coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish by injecting them with a vinegar solution, after which reef fish eat the remains.
- The Dampier Strait between Waigeo and Batanta is named after the English explorer William Dampier.
Why it is worth it
Raja Ampat is a scattering of more than 1,500 islands, cays and shoals off the northwestern tip of New Guinea, gathered around four large islands: Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool. The name means "Four Kings", and it comes from a local legend in which a woman found seven eggs, four of which hatched into the kings of the four main islands. Above the water the archipelago is all forested hills and limestone; below it lie the reefs of the Coral Triangle, the stretch of Southeast Asian seas with the richest marine life on Earth.
The numbers are almost hard to believe. More than 600 species of hard coral have been recorded here, around three quarters of all the reef-building corals known, together with well over a thousand species of reef fish and hundreds of molluscs. What that means in practice is reefs that seem to vibrate with life: walls of soft coral and sea fans in the channels where tidal currents bring in nutrients, schools of fish so dense they shade the sun, and shallow coral gardens that can be seen with nothing more than a mask. The forests on land are just as remarkable, home to two birds-of-paradise found nowhere else, the red and the Wilson's, as well as an endemic palm.
The most famous view is not underwater at all. In the Fam group, a wooden stairway of about three hundred steps climbs a karst pinnacle at Piaynemo to a lookout over a maze of green, mushroom-shaped limestone islets scattered across turquoise water. The archipelago was linked to the Sultanate of Tidore in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the first European known to have reached it was the Portuguese navigator Jorge de Menezes in 1526. Today much of the sea is managed as marine protected areas, and UNESCO added the islands to its network of biosphere reserves in 2025.
Getting there
The regency capital, Waisai, on the island of Waigeo, is the usual entry point; most dive resorts and village homestays are spread among the islands within boat range of it. Travellers fly into Domine Eduard Osok Airport (SOQ) in Sorong on mainland New Guinea, about 113 km away, and cross to Waisai by fast ferry, a trip of about two hours. From Waisai, the outer islands and dive sites are reached by local boat; many visitors explore instead on liveaboard dive boats.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Raja Ampat, or the Four Kings, is an archipelago located off the northwest tip of Bird's Head Peninsula, Southwest Papua province, Indonesia. It comprises over 1,500 small islands, cays, and shoals around the four main islands of Misool, Salawati, Batanta, and Waigeo, and the smaller island of Kofiau.
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