The Torres Islands are an island chain in the Torba Province of the country of Vanuatu, the country’s northernmost island group. The chain of islands that make up this micro-archipelago straddles the broader cultural boundary between Island Melanesia and several Polynesian outliers located in the neighbouring Solomon Islands. To the island chain’s north is Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands, to its south is Espiritu Santo, and to its southeast are the Banks Islands. To the west, beneath the ocean surface, is the deep Torres Trench, which is the subduction zone between the Australian Plate and Pacific Plate.
The seven islands in the Torres group, from north to south, are Hiw or Hiu (the largest), Metoma, Tegua, Ngwel (an uninhabited islet), Linua, Lo or Loh, and Toga. The island chain stretches across . The highest point of the chain is only above sea level. These islands are less rugged than the other islands of Vanuatu that lie further to the south. Contrary to popular belief, only a few stretches of the Torres Islands' coastlines are graced with white sand beaches; in reality, their shores are mostly made of rocky coral uplift.
As of 2020, the Torres Islands had a total population of approximately 1128 people. They are dispersed across at least ten settlements of various sizes, all located on or near coastal areas. The names of these settlements are: Yögevigemëne (or Yögemëne for short), Tinemēvönyö, Yawe and Yakwane (on Hiw), Lotew (on Tegua; sometimes misspelled Lateu), Lungharegi, Telakwlakw and Rinuhe (on Lo), and Likwal and Litew (on Toga). A small airstrip on Linua, opened in 1983, provides the only regular transportation link between the Torres Islands and the rest of Vanuatu. Lungharegi is the administrative centre for the Torres Islands, but its governance role is minimal. It has a community phone and medical clinic, but no bank or police station, and only two sparsely stocked stores. Carlos Mondragón, a researcher whose work largely focuses on Vanuatu, notes:The Torres lie in a scarcely populated maritime region that is distant from Vanuatu's main centres of government, transport and commerce, and suffer from very poor delivery of basic services - health, education and transport.
Name The name “Torres” was bestowed on the islands by European cartographers, in remembrance of the sixteenth-century navigator Luis Vaz de Torres, who had briefly visited the islands of North and Central Vanuatu in April, May and June 1606, as part of a Spanish expedition across the Pacific, from South America to Terra Australis. The navigator's name was also bestowed on the important Torres Strait, which separates mainland Australia from the island of New Guinea. Ironically, Torres never saw, or even heard about, the Torres Islands. However, his commander, the Portuguese captain Fernandes de Queirós, serving the Spanish Crown, did sail near the Torres Islands at one point in search of the Santa Cruz Islands.
Long before Europeans arrived, the indigenous inhabitants and neighbors of these islands had called them by various other names, the most important of which, in Proto-Torres-Banks, was *Vava (> Lo-Toga Vave , Mwotlap (with locative prefix a-) Avap ). However, after the name “Torres” began appearing on maps, that name eventually stuck, and the islands have now been widely known by that name for almost two hundred years. Today, even the inhabitants of the islands use that name, and only the oldest among them recall the Lo-Toga name Vave. They now designate their group of islands as ‘Torres’, and in general are indifferent to (or unaware of) the origin story of the name.
History Stuart Bedford, writing in the journal Terra Australis in 2006, noted that “the archaeology of Northern Vanuatu remains somewhat of an archaeological terra incognita”. The archealogical work of Galipaud in 1998 was mainly focused on only two of the Torres Islands, Tegua and Toga. Ceramic artefacts were found to be fairly frequent at surface level, with excavations being carried out using test-pit methods across both open and cave sites. Surface-collected materials included shell adzes, arm rings, volcanic glass and worn pottery. Galipaud believed some of the pottery to be Mangaasi style, a style named after an important archeological site on the west coast of Efate in Central Vanuatu, though other shards appeared to be examples of later plainware, a less decorated style found across the Polynesian region. Charcoal recovered from test-pits on Toga were tested using both AMS and C-14 radiocarbon-dating, dating the material between 2739-2333 BP (i.e. 789–383 BCE), and giving an estimate of the earliest settlement of the region. This can be compared with the larger northern island of Malekula, where dating of shell and charcoal samples was similarly placed at around 2700 BP. Bedford notes that this date is slightly later than the suggested arrival of Lapita culture elsewhere in the country, which is dated to roughly 3000-2900 BP. Whilst evidence of Lapita culture has been established in nearly all parts of the country, Shing and Willie note that the Torres Islands are the only inhabited region that does not show Lapita settlement.
There is abundant archaeological and oral-history evidence that, before European contact, the pattern of settlements in the Torres Islands was quite different from pattern prevalent in the coastal villages of today. Back then, most villages and extended family areas (called nakamals, locally gemël) were located on higher ground, away from the shore, and were inhabited by fewer people. Thus, the islands were probably dotted with small clearings, in the middle of which were a handful of households and public spaces.
Although several European explorers reached the islands in the 19th century, in the early 1880s the islanders were quickly drawn into the sphere of influence of the Melanesian Mission. The establishment of coastal settlements, both for church work and for trade, had the effect of attracting the inhabitants to leave their inland hamlets, and concentrate in these coastal villages.See p.98 of: .
Around this time, a Torres islander, known today by his Christianised name of Adams Tuwia, was transferred to the Mission's headquarters on Norfolk Island, where he eventually became ordained a priest. However, the first Melanesian ever to be ordained as a Christian priest was George Sarawia, from the neighbouring Banks Islands. Because the Anglicans had set up their regional centre of operations in the Banks Islands, the mission's leadership decided to adopt the language of Mota in the Banks as the language of choice for translating and transmitting Christian teachings across the whole region comprising the Banks, Torres and Temotu island groups. As a result, according to local accounts, the Mota language continued to be taught in the Torres mission school until the early 1970s, and it is still possible to find elder Torres Islanders who can speak and understand Mota.
Notwithstanding the existence of a mission in the Torres Islands in the late nineteenth century, a non-local missionary only came to reside in those islands for an extended period in the first decade of the 20th century. This was the Rev. Walter John Durrad, who lived on Tegua and then moved to Lo between 1905 and 1910.
The first permanent mission station and church-house of the Torres Islands was originally established by Durrad on the south coast of Tegua, but was eventually moved to Vipaka, on the southwest side of Lo, following an apparent rumour of incestuous behaviour by the high chief of Tegua, whose sin was judged to be too abhorrent for the sensitivity of the Mission's leadership. More importantly, during this time - between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth - the population of the Torres Islands suffered catastrophic decline as a combined result of the various epidemic diseases that were introduced by Europeans and the accelerated out-migration provoked by Blackbirding. According to vaguely worded Mission records located at the Diocese of Banks and Torres headquarters on Sola (Vanua Lava), at some time in the early 1930s the total population of the Torres group numbered no more than 56 persons. Hence, the subsequent recovery of the indigenous population of these islands, along with the continuity of linguistic and cultural values that they still exhibit, can be described as nothing less than remarkable.
According to some researchers, the Torres islands belonged to a broader regional complex of human and material exchanges that extended well into present-day Temotu province in the Solomons. These networks are however not reflected by any facts of linguistic convergence: the Torres languages exclusively show connections with the Banks languages further south.“The extreme linguistic difference between Vanikoro languages on the one hand, and those of the Torres & Banks islands on the other, suggests that there has been no in-depth contacts between the two regions”, in: .. In 1906, the Torres Islands eventually became part of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides in 1906; they were subsequently incorporated into the Republic of Vanuatu in 1980.
Ecology Like the rest of the country, the Torres islands are in the Vanuatu rain forests ecoregion. The coconut crab (Birgus latro) is one of the islands' most famous species. On the island of Loh, However, since the opening of the airstrip at Linua these animals became the single most important cash crop in the Torres group. To date, the sale of Birgus has been directly governed by the fluctuating demand of the tourist market in faraway Port Vila and, to a lesser degree, the provincial township of Luganville. As early as 1991, scientists acknowledged a 'rapid decline occurring in many of these [coconut crab] populations'.
Consequently, various concerned individuals and groups successfully pressured the local provincial government of SanMa (the province in which Luganville is located) to declare a temporary ban on the sale, purchase or consumption of crab in that province. This ban first took effect in the first semestre of 2004. Exports of crab from the Banks and Torres Islands (i.e. TorBa Province) to Port Vila is regulated through a relatively inefficient scheme of "open" and "closed" seasons and intra-regional quotas. In 1994, a catch quota for B. latro in the Torres region was set at 6000 crabs per year, with the closed season running from September to November. As of 2020, this number was set to 5000, with only two license holders permitted to buy them; this caused frustrations amongst local communities in Torba Province who rely on the crab as their main source of income. Journalist Patience Mawa shared the feelings of Kimstone William, the Community Liaison Officer in Torres:He says there are other agricultural sources of income but these industries need to be built up with more assistance from agriculture officers so that new agricultural methods can be introduced to improve farming productivity on Torres.As of September 2026, the penalty for catching B. latro in Torba Province during the two-month closed period is a fine of up to VT1million.
Another potential threat to B. latro is the invasive species W. auropunctata, which has reduced arthropod diversity elsewhere.
Alongside B. latro, Mondragón suggests that there are six 'culturally salient' animal species in the Torres region, providing their local names. These include the nikwerot (P. fundatus), B. latro, and spiders, 'whose attributes... are associated with the entity known as Merawehih (Meravtit, in the language of Hiu [sic]), the greatest culture hero in the Torres group.'