Levuka is the reason most travellers come to Ovalau. Fiji's first colonial capital, founded as a beach-trading settlement by Europeans in the 1820s and made the official capital after British annexation in 1874, the town retains an unusually intact stretch of late-19th-century Pacific port architecture — wooden two-storey buildings with verandas crowded onto a single coastal road (Beach Street) between the steep volcanic hills and the reef.
The town became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013 — Fiji's only one. Walk Beach Street end to end, looking up at the upper-storey verandas; the Levuka Community Centre and the small Pacific Fishing Company plant give the place a working-town reality that other heritage sites lack. The administrative capital moved to Suva in 1882 because Levuka had no room to grow, which is exactly why it survives now.