Fiji's Garden Island — 80% rainforest, Rainbow Reef's world-class soft coral diving, and waterfalls you can swim in off a dirt road
Taveuni is Fiji's third-largest island and its most lush — nicknamed the Garden Island for the dense rainforest covering 80% of the land. Rainbow Reef in the Somosomo Strait is one of the world's top dive sites, famous for the Great White Wall (a vertical soft coral cliff at 30 meters) and an extraordinary density of sea life year-round. The International Date Line once bisected the island; a concrete marker at the 180th meridian lets visitors stand with one foot in today and one in yesterday.
Taveuni has been inhabited by Fijian peoples for over 3,000 years; the island's traditional chiefs of the Cakaudrove confederacy controlled surrounding waters and inter-island trade before European contact. British traders arrived in the 1800s drawn by sandalwood and later copra plantations, which brought indentured laborers from South Asia. Taveuni's rugged terrain and absence of a coastal plain limited plantation development; the relative economic marginalization that followed preservation both the old-growth rainforest and the traditional village governance structure intact into the 21st c…