Phu Quy Island

Photographs of Phú Quý are often lovely, full of blue sea, coral reefs and the rock channels of Cao Cát Mountain. But this island does not give away all its beauty in a picture.

Only when visitors set foot on it, start to walk and follow the coast road in the salty wind does Phú Quý slowly open up.

The island lies off the south-central coast of Vietnam. Today it belongs to the special zone of Phú Quý, in the province of Lâm Đồng. Before the administrative reorganization of 2025, it was the island district of Phú Quý, in the province of Bình Thuận. Many people still know it by that name. It is 56 nautical miles southeast of Phan Thiết and covers about 18 square kilometers.

High-speed boats carry visitors out to the island from the port of Phan Thiết. The crossing takes about two to two and a half hours. All that while, the mainland slips away behind the boat, until there is nothing around but sea.

Stepping ashore at the port of Phú Quý, a visitor feels something that photos online cannot carry: a slow pace. There are no traffic jams and no long rows of resorts. There is only the coast road, motorbikes rolling along unhurried, and sea air heavy with salt.

The first stop that many groups choose is Vạn An Thạnh, one of the two national historical and cultural monuments on the island. It is a place of worship for Ông Nam Hải. The name refers to the whale, which fishing communities honor as a guardian of people who work at sea. For generations, the island's fishermen have bound their trade, their voyages out to sea and their whole lives on the water to this shrine.

The second national monument is the Temple of Princess Bàn Tranh. In 2015, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism ranked it a national historical monument. The people of Phú Quý tell that long ago a Cham princess crossed the sea to the island. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa. In the story, she cleared the wild land and dug wells for fresh water. Then she taught the islanders to farm, so that they could live on an island in the middle of the open sea. It is a legend, handed down from one generation to the next, not a page of proven history. Even so, standing before the temple, it is easy to see why the islanders want to remember forever the one who first opened up their land.

Cao Cát Mountain tells a story older than any temple on the island. It holds a complex of sedimentary rock that formed from volcanic eruptions. Geologists at the Vietnam Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources consider it of real value and are still studying it. The basalt of the island comes from two groups of volcanic eruptions in the deep geological past. Those eruptions helped build the island of Phú Quý as it stands today. The rocks and rock channels at Cao Cát are traces of volcanic material, weathered over a long time by wind, rain and waves. People climb Cao Cát for the photos. But to stand among those rock channels is to stand inside the island's own record of how it took shape, over a span of time almost too long to imagine.

The lighthouse on Cấm Mountain gives a view over the whole island. The path up climbs more than 120 stone steps along the mountainside, and some stretches are slippery. The reward at the top is the whole blue sea, spread wide and open.

Around the island there are also Bãi Nhỏ and Gành Hang, and a flagpole 22.6 meters tall that stands high in the sea wind.

There is another Phú Quý under the water. The marine protected area around the island is home to 134 species of hard coral, 72 species of seaweed and 15 species of mollusks. Offshore, coral reefs and seagrass beds spread far and wide. That is why so many groups leave the island still remembering coral dives, paddleboarding and visits to the floating fish farms.

In the village of Phú An stands one more temple, for Master Sài Nại. The islanders tell that he was a Chinese merchant and also a geomancer. He is said to have lived around the 16th and 17th centuries. The temple was recognized as a provincial monument in 2010. Each year, on the fourth day of the fourth lunar month, the whole community gathers here for the ceremony called lễ giao phiên.

In 2026, a Thai newspaper named Phú Quý on a list of the 10 most untouristed destinations worth discovering in Southeast Asia. Phú Quý is not as comfortable as the big resorts, and it has no need to be. The island is still itself: an island far from the mainland, with its nature, its history and a pace of life that many other places left behind long ago. From the lighthouse on Cấm Mountain, the blue sea still spreads wide around the island. Below, motorbikes still roll along the coast road, in no hurry to be anywhere, just like the slow pace a visitor first feels on stepping ashore at the port.