Vanuatu Yachts · Destinations: Port Vila
History, Suspended in Perfect Water
The island where the Pacific's wartime past and its natural present sit within the same afternoon's reach.
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espiritu santo
The Character
Vanuatu's largest island, Espiritu Santo, carries a weight of history unusual for a place this quiet. During the Second World War it served as a major Allied base in the Pacific, a legacy now resting largely underwater, most famously within the SS President Coolidge, the largest and most accessible shipwreck dive in the world, lying just off Luganville, the island's principal town.
Above the waterline, Santo is defined by rainforest, limestone and an interior few visitors ever properly see, the source of the freshwater blue holes that have become one of Vanuatu's most photographed, and most underrated, natural features.
Here, islands rise like emeralds from a sapphire sea.
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Why It Matters to a Voyage
- One of Vanuatu's four official ports of entry, via Luganville
- Home to the SS President Coolidge and some of the Pacific's finest wreck and reef diving
- The Nanda, Matevulu and Riri blue holes: freshwater lagoons fed by mountain springs over thirty kilometres inland
- Genuinely quiet anchorages along the coast, well beyond the reach of mass tourism infrastructure
- World class, white sand beaches
- International airport, with 2 x weekly direct flights to Brisbane, Australia
The lagoons of Vanuatu are mirrors of the sky, so clear you forget where ocean ends and heaven begins.
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espiritu santo
What Sets the Tone
Santo rewards a slower itinerary. A morning wreck dive, an afternoon paddle into a blue hole through undisturbed rainforest, an evening at anchor where the only lights visible are the stars, this is an island built for guests who came to the Pacific for exactly this, rather than for what the Pacific has become elsewhere.