Coverage / Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands
Melanesia
A double chain of rainforested Melanesian islands east of Papua New Guinea, from the WWII battlefield of Guadalcanal to the reef-and-wreck diving of the Western Province at Munda and Gizo and the vast Marovo Lagoon, the largest saltwater lagoon in the world. Warm, current-fed waters, intact Japanese and American wrecks and a living Kastom culture make it one of the Pacific's least-touched diving nations.
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Scuba Diving
- GizoApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovGizo pairs a great wreck with great reef. Its signature dive is the Toa Maru, a large Japanese armed transport sunk in 1943 and now one of the most intact big wrecks in the Pacific, lying on a slope so you can work from shallow to deep, holds still packed with trucks, a tank, medical supplies, sake bottles and ammunition. Around it the Western Solomons deliver everything else: coral walls and drop-offs, current-fed reefs thick with fish, grey reef and other sharks, and a run of downed WWII warplanes on the sand, including a Japanese Zero and American fighters. The reefs off Gizo are healthy and lightly dived, and the town makes an easy base with a short boat hop to most sites. Divers work with a long-established local operator whose crew has decades on these reefs, running small boats to keep groups tight. It is wreck-and-reef diving with real history, in a corner of the Pacific few travellers reach.
- Marovo LagoonApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovMarovo Lagoon is the largest saltwater lagoon on earth, a maze of reef-fringed islands enclosed by a double barrier reef in the Western Solomons, and its diving is as varied as its geography. On the sheltered inner reefs you drift over coral gardens and past villages built on stilts; at the passes and outer walls the lagoon meets The Slot, the deep channel where Pacific War fleets once passed, and the water turns serious. Divers come for schooling hammerheads that gather off the reef between about May and August, for mantas, eagle rays, grey reef sharks and turtles, and for the WWII ship and aircraft wrecks scattered through the area. The lagoon's long-running island eco-resort is crewed entirely by people from surrounding Marovo villages, trained in-house, and its non-profit has funded local schooling and healthcare, so a dive week here directly supports the communities whose reef it is. It is remote, quiet, current-fed diving with a strong sense of place.
- MundaApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovMunda is the easiest world-class diving in the Solomon Islands, a quiet village on New Georgia with a runway built by the Japanese in WWII and now served by direct flights from Brisbane. Off its shore lie more than thirty dive sites within short boat runs, and the mix is unusually rich: steep coral walls dropping into blue water, caverns and cuts, healthy hard and soft coral, and sharks and schooling barracuda in the current. The war is still in the water and on the reef, with a P-39 Airacobra fighter and a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber sitting on the sand, and a US wartime dump site scattered with ordnance. Munda is also the doorway to the wider Western Province and the Marovo Lagoon beyond. What sets it apart is the operator: a Solomon Islander-led dive centre that has trained local guides and built one of the Pacific's genuine community dive-tourism stories, so the diving comes with real local knowledge of reef and Kastom alike.
Best months at a glance
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