Port Vila's past runs from 3,000-year-old Lapita potters to blackbirding schooners, a bizarre dual-flag colony run by France and Britain at once, and a WWII base that dumped its jeeps into the sea. Three days of museums, monuments and village stories.
Founded 1956, the museum holds Lapita pottery shards ~3,000 years old, slit gongs (tamtam) from Ambrym, Big Nambas headdresses and the Tanna canoe collection. Guides demonstrate sand drawing, a UNESCO-listed script of 300+ designs. Open Mon-Fri 09:00-16:30, Sat to 12:00.
Next to the Cultural Centre, the archives hold Condominium-era registers, mission diaries and the Oral Traditions collection — thousands of hours of chiefly genealogies recorded by volunteer fieldworkers from every island since 1976.
Vanuatu's only UNESCO World Heritage site (2008). The 17th-century paramount chief Roi Mata ended inter-clan war, then was buried with 50 followers on Artok/Hat Island. Fels Cave, where he died, holds ochre and charcoal rock art.
Roi Mata's mass grave was excavated by José Garanger in 1967, confirming an oral tradition passed down 400 years — 25 couples buried alive beside the chief. The island remains taboo; boats circle it while guides retell the burial.
From 1906 to 1980 Vanuatu was the New Hebrides Condominium — two police forces, two currencies, two prison systems, three legal codes. The old British Residency compound above the harbour still carries colonial verandah architecture and boundary markers.
On 30 July 1980 the New Hebrides became Vanuatu here, after the Santo Rebellion led by Jimmy Stevens' Nagriamel movement was put down by Papua New Guinean troops. The park hosts the annual Independence Day flag raising and string band contests.
Marist missionaries arrived in the New Hebrides in 1887 after Presbyterian John Williams was killed on Erromango in 1839. The hillside cathedral and adjoining Montmartre mission school served the French Condominium community and holds mission-era registers.
The Condominium ran separate British and French jails; a convicted man could choose which nation tried him. Concrete cell blocks and iron doors survive amid vegetation, later used during the 1980 unrest before independence.
The US built a base for 500,000 troops in the New Hebrides from 1942 as a staging point for Guadalcanal. When France refused to buy the surplus, bulldozers, jeeps and cranes were driven into the sea. Vila's Bauerfield Airport is named after Marine pilot Harold Bauer.
The British Resident Commissioner's 1913 residence sat on this harbour island, deliberately opposite the French Residency on the mainland so neither power looked down on the other. The white colonial building survives among the resort grounds.
Erakor was settled by Samoan and Aneityum missionary teachers in the 1840s; measles and dysentery epidemics killed much of the original population, and survivors moved to the mainland shore. The old church and mission graves sit on Erakor Island.
Chief Kalfabun's family run evening tours covering pre-contact warfare, blackbirding — the 1860s-1900s trade that shipped some 40,000 ni-Vanuatu to Queensland and Fiji cane fields — plus traditional medicine, food traps and cannibalism accounts.