Ono-i-Lau is a group of islands within a

barrier reef A coral reef is an underwater ecosystem characterized by reef-building corals. Reefs are formed of colonies of coral polyps held together by calcium carbonate. Most coral reefs are built from stony corals, whose polyps cluster in groups. Co ...

system in the Fijian archipelago of

Lau Islands The Lau Islands aka little Tonga (also called the Lau Group, the Eastern Group, the Eastern Archipelago) of Fiji are situated in the southern Pacific Ocean, just east of the Koro Sea. Of this chain of about sixty islands and islets, about thirty ...

(''ono'' means "six" in the Fijian language). There are four central

volcanic A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates a ...

islands: Onolevu, Doi (or Ndoi) Lovoni and Ndavura, the uppermost parts of the volcanic edifice rising from the Lau Ridge slightly more than below

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardise ...

and on which the reef and other islands are built. There are also three clusters of

coral Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and ...

limestone islets, Yanuya (50 islets) and Mana (46 islets) on the barrier reef and Niuta (7 tiny islets). A sand cay, Udui, is not counted as one of the six “islands”. The group forms one of the southernmost of the

; it is located at 20.80° South and 178.75° West, and occupies an area of . It has a maximum elevation of . It is south-southwest of

Vatoa Vatoa (pronounced ) (known as Turtle Island after Cook's visit) is an outlier of Fiji's Lau Group. History Vatoa was the only island of present-day Fiji visited by James Cook. The island was sighted on 2 July 1774. The next day, a Sunday, th ...

, the nearest largish island; the only land further south in the Lau Group is in the two small Tuvana islands of coral limestone and sand. There are four villages in the group – Nukuni and Lovoni adjacent and Matokana on Onolevu, the largest island, and Doi on Doi.

History

The group was the location of the first recorded communication between

Fijians Fijians ( fj, iTaukei, lit=Owners (of the land)) are a nation and ethnic group native to Fiji, who speak Fijian and share a common history and culture. Fijians, or ''iTaukei'', are the major indigenous people of the Fiji Islands, and live ...

and Europeans – Captain William Oliver and men of the Matavy, tender to HMS ''Pandora'', in June 1791.Rogers, G. 1983. The first recorded contact between

and Europeans. Domodomo 1983 (1) : 72–77.

References

External links

* Islands of Fiji Lau Islands {{Fiji-geo-stub