Indonesia’s Hindu island sits inside a coral megadiversity triangle
Bali is Indonesia’s westernmost Lesser Sunda island, a province of Bali plus Nusa Penida and neighbours between Java and Lombok. About 86.4 percent of residents follow Balinese Hinduism, and the island’s arts—from dance to metalwork—feed a global tourism reputation inside the Coral Triangle’s extreme reef diversity.
Bali lies east of Java and west of Lombok, and the province also takes in Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Ceningan to the south-east. Denpasar, the capital, is the biggest city in the Lesser Sunda chain and second only to Makassar in eastern Indonesia, while the upland town of Ubud counts as the cultural heart. Tourism has boomed since the 1980s, to the point that Bali is now Indonesia's clearest case of overtourism, and tourism-linked business makes up about 80 percent of the economy. Tripadvisor named it the world's top destination in 2017, 2021 and 2026, and it has hosted Miss World 2013, the 2018 IMF and World Bank meetings and the 2022 G20 summit.
People reached Bali around 2000 BC, part of the Austronesian expansion that began in Taiwan and spread through maritime Southeast Asia into Oceania; stone tools from that era turn up near Cekik in the west. The name appears in old inscriptions as Vāli-dvīpa, dvīpa being Sanskrit for island, including on the Belanjong pillar of about 914 under King Sri Kesari Warmadewa. Vāli might mean offering, giving island of offerings, or might relate to words for strength.
Early inscriptions show an independent Bali with its own dialect, shaped by Sanskrit and Pali, where Buddhism and Shaivism coexisted, and nine Hindu sects each honoured a particular deity. Around 989 King Udayana Warmadewa married the Javanese princess Mahendradatta, bringing more Hindu and Javanese influence, and their son Airlangga was born around 1001. Today Bali is Indonesia's only Hindu-majority province.
Offshore, the island belongs to the Coral Triangle, with more than 500 reef-building coral species, about seven times the Caribbean's total. On land, the Subak irrigation system is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ten traditional royal houses, predating Dutch rule and heirs to the Bali Kingdom, still form a confederation, each tied to a territory, though Indonesia does not recognise them.
Source: Bali
