Hiva Oa

Hiva Oa is the most visited island of the Marquesas and the one with the most developed services — which is to say a small hotel, a guesthouse or two, and a weekly flight from Tahiti. The island is dominated by deep valleys cut between soaring volcanic ridges, and the landscape shifts dramatically from the coastal cliffs to the lush forested interior.

The main village of Atuona is the administrative centre of the southern Marquesas. From here you can reach the Calvary Cemetery, where both Gauguin and Jacques Brel are buried, and the Paul Gauguin Cultural Centre with reproductions of his Marquesan paintings and his reconstructed house. The original House of Pleasure was demolished, but the replica gives a sense of the man's defiant late style.

things to do sight
A story
Paul Gauguin arrived on Hiva Oa in 1901 exhausted, ill, and at odds with the colonial authorities in Tahiti. He built a house he called "La Maison du Jouir" — the House of Pleasure — decorated it with carvings that scandalised the local Catholic missionaries, and died there in May 1903. The Belgian singer Jacques Brel arrived 72 years later, also ill, also in flight from fame, and was buried in the same cemetery two years after that. Two men, different eras, the same island, the same impulse to disappear.

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