Tafea is the southernmost of the six

provinces A province is an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman , which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outside Italy. The term ''provi ...

Vanuatu Vanuatu ( or ; ), officially the Republic of Vanuatu (; ), is an island country in Melanesia located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago, which is of volcanic origin, is east of northern Australia, northeast of New Caledonia, east o ...

. The name is an

acronym An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...

for the five main islands that make up the province: Tanna, Aneityum, Futuna, Erromango and Aniwa.

History

Unlike the other provinces of Vanuatu, the territorial integrity of this administrative unit has been unchanged since the times of the

Condominium A condominium (or condo for short) is an ownership regime in which a building (or group of buildings) is divided into multiple units that are either each separately owned, or owned in common with exclusive rights of occupation by individual own ...

, when it was called ''Southern District'', or ''Tanna'' after the main island. Only the

capital Capital and its variations may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** Capital region, a metropolitan region containing the capital ** List of national capitals * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Econom ...

moved from

Lenakel Lenakel is the largest town on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. It has a population of 1,473. It is located on the west coast of the island near the administrative capital of Isangel and serves as a major port of entry. Language It is the cente ...

to nearby

Isangel Isangel is a town in Vanuatu. Located on the island of Tanna, it is the provincial administrative capital of Tafea Province. Population The town has a population of about 1,200, most of them Melanesians; the major languages of the area are Le ...

, less than two kilometers more southeast. A secessionist movement began in the 1970s, and the Nation of Tanna was proclaimed on 24 March 1974. While the

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

were more open to allowing its holdings in Vanuatu independence, it was opposed by the French colonists and finally suppressed by the Anglo-French Condominium authorities on 29 June 1974. In 1980, there was another attempt to secede, declaring the Tafea Nation on 1 January 1980, its name coming from the initials of the five islands that were to be part of the nation (Tanna, Aniwa, Futuna, Erromango and Aneityum). British forces intervened on 26 May 1980, allowing the islands to become part of the newly independent nation of Vanuatu on 30 July 1980.

Geography

The province has a population of 32,5402009 Census Summary release final
- Government of Vanuatu people and an area of 1,628 km². The main island, though second to

Erromango Erromango is the fourth largest island in the Vanuatu archipelago. With a land area of , it is the largest island in Tafea Province, the southernmost of Vanuatu's six administrative regions. Name The endonym for Erromango in Erromangan is ''Ne ...

in area, is Tanna, with some 80 percent of the province population, with the provincial capital of

, and the largest village of

, both close together on the southwest coast. The three larger islands are

Melanesia Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Vanu ...

n, but the smaller two, Aniwa and Futuna, also known under the collective term ''Erronan Islands'', are

Polynesian outlier Polynesian outliers are a number of culturally Polynesian societies that geographically lie outside the main region of Polynesian influence, known as the Polynesian Triangle; instead, Polynesian outliers are scattered in the two other Pacific su ...

s. Futuna is sometimes called West Futuna to distinguish it from

Futuna Island, Wallis and Futuna Futuna (; ) is the largest island in Hoorn Islands or Îles Horne, located in the Pacific Ocean, part of the French overseas collectivity (''collectivité d'outre-mer'') of Wallis and Futuna. The island occupies an area of and as of 2018 it ...

. The island of Tanna has the world's most accessible volcano,

Mount Yasur Mount Yasur is a volcano on Tanna Island, Vanuatu, high above sea level, on the coast near Sulphur Bay, northeast of the taller Mount Tukosmera, which was active in the Pleistocene. It has a largely unvegetated pyroclastic cone with a nearl ...

, with 1,084 meters the highest peak of the province. Aniwa Island is the only

coral Corals are colonial marine invertebrates within the subphylum Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact Colony (biology), colonies of many identical individual polyp (zoology), polyps. Coral species include the important Coral ...

island, the other four are

volcanic A volcano is commonly defined as a vent or fissure 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 fo ...

and reach much higher elevations than Aniwa.

Anatom Aneityum (also known as Anatom or Keamu) is the southernmost island of Vanuatu, in the province of Tafea. Geography Aneityum is the southernmost island of Vanuatu (not counting the Matthew and Hunter Islands, which are disputed with New Caledo ...

is the southernmost island of Vanuatu (not counting the remote, tiny and uninhabited

Matthew and Hunter Islands Matthew Island and Hunter Island are two uninhabited volcanic islands in the South Pacific, east of New Caledonia and south-east of Vanuatu. The pair, which lie apart, are claimed by Vanuatu as part of Tafea Province, and considered by the ...

, to the southeast, which are disputed with

New Caledonia New Caledonia ( ; ) is a group of islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean, southwest of Vanuatu and east of Australia. Located from Metropolitan France, it forms a Overseas France#Sui generis collectivity, ''sui generis'' collectivity of t ...

, but which are considered by the people of Anatom Island part of their custom ownership). Its southeastern cape ''Nétchan Néganneaing'' is the southernmost point of land in Vanuatu, more southerly than the southern satellite islet

Inyeug Inyeug Island is a small uninhabited island in Tafea Province of Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean. "Inyeug" means "Small Island" in a local language. Inyueg is also called Mystery Island by the cruise ships that regularly visit the island. The isla ...

. The latter, however, is surrounded Intao Reef, that extends even further south, albeit submerged, thus being the southernmost feature of Vanuatu.

Islands

References

Citations

Footnotes

External links

* {{Coord, 19, 30, S, 169, 30, E, region:VU-TA_type:adm1st_source:GNS-enwiki, display=title Provinces of Vanuatu