Levuka

Losing the capital in 1877 is what kept the town standing

Levuka strings along the beach on the east coast of Ovalau, set among coconut and mango trees beneath the forested slopes of an extinct volcano. Settlers and traders founded it around 1820 as the first modern town in Fiji, and it grew into a busy port and a hub of the sea cucumber trade. The crowd that came ashore mixed traders, missionaries, shipwrights, speculators and vagabonds with respectable businessmen. By 1870 more than 2,000 people lived there.

When the Kingdom of Fiji was founded in 1871, Seru Epenisa Cakobau was crowned king at Levuka. On 10 October 1874, at Nasova on the southern edge of town, he signed the Deed of Cession that handed the islands to Britain, and Levuka became the colony's capital. It kept the job for three years. The hills behind it rise to about 600 metres, many of them cliffs, and left no room to grow, so in 1877 the administration moved to Suva, a change made official in 1882.

Firsts crowd the waterfront. Fiji's first bank, post office, school, hospital, town hall and municipal government were all here. The Fiji Times, still in print, started in Levuka in 1869. Levuka Public School opened in 1879 as the country's first public school and educated many of the leaders around independence in 1970. Lodge Polynesia, the oldest Masonic lodge in the South Pacific, was founded in 1875. The town switched on Fiji's first public electricity in 1927, three days ahead of Suva.

Much of the old port survives. Single and two-storey timber buildings clad in weatherboard or corrugated iron still line Beach Street behind a stone and concrete sea wall, and the lanes, footbridges and steps follow the same lines they did when first laid out. Sacred Heart church and its presbytery date from the 1860s, and so does the Royal Hotel. At the north end of town the chief of Levuka village, the Tui Levuka, descends from the chief who welcomed the first Europeans. UNESCO inscribed Levuka Historical Port Town in June 2013 as a rare late colonial port shaped by the indigenous community around it, and credits the care taken since the town's historic value was first recognised in 1973.

Fire is the standing risk to all that timber. The Masonic Lodge, the only Romanesque-revival building in town, was set alight during the unrest after the 2000 coup. It held artefacts and records of Levuka's history going back to 1875, and no one has been prosecuted.