Ha Long Bay floating villages

What happened to the floating villages?

In 2014 the province moved the bay’s floating-village households ashore, to a resettlement area in Hà Phong ward that is now part of Hà Tu ward. The bay’s management board, the Ha Long Bay - Yen Tu World Heritage Management Board, counts 354 households, nearly 2,000 people, from seven villages. What visitors see today are raft houses kept by the Board, fish-farm rafts, and rowing and kayak services staffed largely by former residents or their children.

The move was a long time coming. In June 2013 Hùng Thắng ward had about 5,000 people living on land and over 2,000 at sea, in three areas: Cửa Vạn, Vung Viêng with Cặp Dè, and Ba Hang. The province had pressed the city to act from September 2012, and that December it approved 167 billion VND for 364 new houses on almost 8 ha at Hà Phong. The rafts were to be cleared by 15 February 2014, late enough for families to harvest their farmed fish, and households moved into the new village during that year.

Families whose raft had been moored in one place before 21 March 2008 and who owned no home ashore received an 80 m² plot with a house. The resettlement area covers 7.7 ha and 364 homes, organised as Khu phố 8 with six residents’ groups. The reasons given were clean water and scenery, protection of the World Heritage property, safety in storms, and access to schools and services. IUCN noted in 2022 that the nomination dossier gave reducing environmental impact as the reason, and that roughly 10% of the former villagers work in tourism, rowing small boats and showing their traditional culture.

Life ashore was not easy for everyone. By 2019 many resettled families were struggling, some had sold their plots and gone back to sea, and the head of Khu phố 8 said more than a dozen groups of fishing families still lived afloat. Small groups of families who did not qualify for housing still live on boats in the bay and near the shore. They are not a visitor attraction.

The Board took over 69 raft houses from the departing families in 2014 and placed them at Cửa Vạn and Vung Viêng for visitors to see. By October 2023 about half had been damaged, sunk or disposed of. Fishing has been banned in the strictly protected heritage zone since 2018, and fish farming is zoned outside it.

The photographs below were all taken between 2003 and 2012, before the move ashore. Only one names its village: at Hoa Cương the name is painted on the sign of the nearest house. Open any of them to see it at full size with its caption and credit.

Cua Van floating village

Cửa Vạn often appears in “most beautiful village” claims. They come from list articles: a Travel + Leisure slideshow of September 2014 that put it ninth of sixteen coastal towns, a Huffington Post list of August 2015 and a blog list that existed by April 2012. Their figures of about 700 people and a floating school describe the village before 2014, and none of them is a UNESCO or government ranking.

Vung Vieng fishing village

Ba Hang and other villages

Ba Hang, where visitors go by woven boat or kayak through three caves into saltwater lakes, is a stop on routes 1 and 5. Beyond the caves lie fish-farm rafts where grouper and other fish are raised, and the rowers are local people working through a cooperative set up in 2008. Typhoon Yagi destroyed the rowing and kayak point in September 2024, and visitors were back within a fortnight. Ba Hang’s eligible households were among those moved to Hà Phong in 2014, and a kayak or rowing boat costs 40,000 VND per person on the Board’s 2024 list.

Other names turn up in older sources. Cặp Dè was a sea area of Hùng Thắng ward, apparently tied to Vung Viêng, and no source from the 2020s describes a village there. Cống Tàu is named in press histories as one of the villages whose people descend from the Giang Võng and Trúc Võng fishers, but no official source gives its location. Neither is on an official route. Tour companies also describe a small village at Cống Đầm, where the Board’s price list bundles kayaking into some cruise prices, but no official count or route stop has been found.

Visiting respectfully

The Board publishes rules for the whole bay: no single-use plastic, no litter, tickets bought only inside the port terminals and nothing bought from vendor boats. It publishes no village code on photography, gifts or tipping. Rowing and kayaking are available only at licensed points, are priced separately from the sightseeing ticket and are paid to the operator.

Questions visitors ask