French Polynesia

The numbers explain the place better than any description. 118 islands, of which 67 are inhabited, spread across 5.5 million km² of ocean — an exclusive economic zone larger than the European Union — with a total land area of just 4,167 km², about the size of Moravia's Zlín and Olomouc regions put together. Two hundred and eighty thousand people live on it, three quarters of them on Tahiti alone.

Almost everyone comes for one image: an overwater bungalow on a turquoise lagoon in Bora Bora. That image is real, it is extremely expensive, and it is roughly one per cent of what is here. The other ninety-nine per cent is a set of five very different archipelagos — the green volcanic Society Islands, the flat coral rings of the Tuamotus, the vertical and empty Marquesas, the cold-water Australs and the remote Gambiers — separated by distances that would swallow Europe.

What surprises people who look past the resorts is how strong the culture is. Tahitian was almost extinguished by missionaries and French schooling and has come back; ori Tahiti dancing and the Heiva festival are genuinely competitive national events, not shows; and the revival of traditional voyaging canoes navigating by star and swell has been one of the great cultural recoveries of the last fifty years.

It is also a long way from anywhere and one of the most expensive destinations on Earth. Everything is imported, the currency is pegged to the euro, and a supermarket in Papeete costs more than one in Paris. Nothing about a trip here is casual, which is part of why it stays as it is.

French Polynesia is the administrative name. Many Polynesians here say Te Ao Mā'ohi — the Mā'ohi world — or simply Tahiti as a shorthand for the whole territory, which annoys people from the other archipelagos exactly as much as you would expect.

Two kinds of island and an enormous amount of water between them. The high islands are volcanic peaks with fringing reefs and lagoons; the atolls are what remains after the volcano sinks — a ring of coral around a lagoon with no land above a few metres. Darwin worked out this sequence in the 1830s, and French Polynesia is where you can see every stage of it in one trip.

The territory covers an area of ocean comparable to Western Europe. Everything routes through Papeete on Tahiti, and the archipelagos are far enough apart that combining two of them properly needs at least two weeks.

The settlement of Polynesia is one of the great achievements in human history: a systematic exploration of the largest ocean on Earth, upwind, in double-hulled sailing canoes, without instruments, at a time when Europeans hugged coastlines.

France arrived in the 1840s, stayed, and in the second half of the twentieth century used these islands for something that still shapes their politics, their health statistics and their relationship with Paris.

The most photographed lagoon on Earth, and the island that invented the overwater bungalow — three Americans put the first ones on stilts at Hotel Bora Bora in 1967 because the island had no good beach to build on. The idea went round the world; the lagoon stayed here.

The Society Islands are where nearly all visitors go, and Bora Bora takes most of the attention. The others are cheaper, greener, more lived-in and, for most travellers, more rewarding.

Everyone lands here and most people leave within hours, which is a mistake worth correcting. Tahiti is not a resort island — it is a working one, with traffic jams, supermarkets, a container port and 70% of the territory's people — and its interior is the wildest landscape in the Society Islands.

Seventy-seven atolls over 1,500 km of ocean — the largest chain of coral atolls in the world, and the part of French Polynesia that looks least like the brochure and rewards you most. No mountains, no rivers, no soil worth the name: a ring of coral a few hundred metres wide around a lagoon you cannot see across.

Te Henua 'Enata, the Land of Men, 1,400 km north-east of Tahiti and utterly unlike it. There is no barrier reef here, so no lagoon and no turquoise: the ocean hits volcanic cliffs directly, valleys run steeply to the sea, and the whole archipelago was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2024.

French Polynesia is one of the top handful of dive destinations on Earth, and the reason is the passes — the channels through the reef where tidal flow concentrates plankton, fish and, therefore, sharks. Diving here is largely drift diving in current, in warm clear water, with big animals.

Nineteenth-century missionaries and the French administration between them banned tattoo, suppressed dance, replaced the language in schools and dismantled the religion of the marae. Almost all of it has come back in the last sixty years, and the recovery is the most interesting thing happening in French Polynesia.

The most impressive thing about Polynesia is not its lagoons but how people got to them. Ancestral navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open ocean, upwind, without instruments, and did it repeatedly enough to settle every habitable island in a triangle the size of Eurasia.

The territory's second export after tourism, and the reason many Tuamotu atolls still have populations. The Tahitian pearl is grown in the black-lipped oyster Pinctada margaritifera, and its dark iridescence — peacock, aubergine, green, silver — occurs naturally in almost no other pearl.

French is the language of administration and Tahitian (Reo Tahiti) is the language of the fenua. Both are official, though the legal status of Tahitian has been repeatedly contested in French courts — as recently as 2023, when the Conseil d'État struck down its use in the territorial assembly.

A territory that is 99.9% ocean has an unusually direct relationship with what happens to the sea. French Polynesia has taken this seriously enough to declare its entire EEZ a managed marine area — 5 million km², one of the largest in the world.

A small, expensive, import-dependent economy that has never fully replaced what the nuclear programme provided. Around 280,000 people, and almost everything they consume arrives by ship from France, New Zealand or Asia.

Raw fish, coconut milk, root crops and the earth oven — plus a century of French technique and a large Chinese community that arrived as plantation labour in the 1860s and reshaped what everyone eats. The result is one of the more surprising food cultures in the Pacific.

One beer that owns the territory, a small but real wine and rum scene, and — unlike Fiji or Vanuatu — almost no kava tradition here at all.

No other place on Earth has been so thoroughly imagined by outsiders. From Bougainville's Nouvelle Cythère in 1768 to the honeymoon brochure, French Polynesia has spent 250 years being described by people who wanted it to mean something — and the local reckoning with that is more interesting than the myth itself.

Tropical, warm and consistent. Air 24–30 °C and sea 26–29 °C all year. What changes is rain and humidity, and there is a real cyclone season — though French Polynesia sits at the eastern edge of the South Pacific cyclone belt and is hit far less often than Fiji or Vanuatu.

About as far as it is possible to go. Prague to Papeete is roughly 17,000 km and 26 to 34 hours with two stops, whichever way you route it. The time difference is 11 or 12 hours behind Czech time — French Polynesia is one of the last places on Earth to enter each day.

One airline does almost all of it, one ferry route matters, and everything else is a boat, a cargo ship or a very long wait. Internal transport is the largest single cost of a French Polynesian trip after the international flight.

One of the most expensive destinations in the world, and honestly so — almost everything is shipped 6,000 km. But the gap between the resort version and the pension version is enormous, and the lagoon is free either way.

Very safe by any measure. Violent crime against visitors is rare, the islands are small, and the risks here are almost entirely to do with water, sun and reef rather than people.

A small population, a fragile reef and an economy where tourism is the largest private employer. What visitors do here has an unusually direct effect, and there are a few things worth getting right.

There is a version of this trip in which you fly for thirty hours, transfer straight to Bora Bora, spend six nights on a deck over the lagoon, and go home having spent a very large sum of money to see the picture you already had on your screen. It is a lovely picture. It is also almost the only part of French Polynesia that has been arranged for you in advance.

What is actually here is a seafaring culture that crossed the largest ocean on the planet without instruments, was reduced by disease and mission to a fraction of itself, had its language and dance and tattoo banned outright, spent thirty years as a nuclear test range, and has spent the last sixty putting itself back together — visibly, competitively, in public, every July, in a stadium in Papeete. Almost no visitor sees any of it.

Two pieces of advice. First, leave the Society Islands. One week on a Tuamotu atoll, in a pension with six rooms and a lagoon at the door, costs less than three nights on Bora Bora and will be the part you remember. Second, go in July and get a ticket to the Heiva, even if you understand nothing being sung. It is not a performance for tourists; it is a country competing with itself.

And eat at the roulottes. Papeete's food trucks on the waterfront, five euros for grilled tuna, the whole city there on a Friday night. The lagoons are extraordinary and everyone photographs them. The thing that will surprise you is the place that lives around them.

— Radim Kaufmann