A sky full of ocean — the world's second-largest atoll where Tiputa Pass channels thousands of sharks and dolphins daily, the Blue Lagoon shimmers inside a reef, and the only winery in French Polynesia grows grapes in coral sand
Rangiroa (meaning 'vast sky' in Tuamotuan) is the largest atoll in French Polynesia and the world's second largest — a ring of 240 motu (islets) enclosing a lagoon of 1,600 sq km, so large it has its own weather systems and could contain the island of Tahiti within it. Its two passes, Tiputa and Avatoru, are the most biologically productive dive sites in French Polynesia: the Tiputa Pass drift dive takes you through a channel at 3–4 knots surrounded by hundreds of grey reef sharks, Napoleon wrasse, and pods of spinner dolphins that live year-round in the pass. The Dominique Auroy Winery at Av…
The Tuamotu Archipelago, of which Rangiroa is the largest atoll, was settled by Polynesian navigator-mariners from the west at least 1,000 years ago, making it among the last habitable Pacific island groups to be reached by human migration. Traditional Tuamotuan culture was organised around Arioi religious societies and sophisticated astronomical navigation; the first European contact came from Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen in 1722 who passed through the archipelago. France formally annexed the Tuamotu group in 1881 and incorporated it into French Polynesia. The archipelago's most notorious…