Pleistocene settlers met Spanish gold dreams in Melanesia
Solomon Islands spans six major and over a thousand lesser Melanesian isles northeast of Australia, beside Bougainville, Vanuatu, and Fiji. People arrived by about 30,000–28,800 BC; Álvaro de Mendaña’s 1568 Spanish voyage from Peru later tagged individual islands while chasing biblical King Solomon associations.
The country covers 28,896 square kilometres and had an estimated 828,857 people in 2025. Honiara, the capital and largest city, lies on Guadalcanal, the biggest island. The wider archipelago also includes Bougainville, now part of Papua New Guinea. At independence in 1978 the nation became a constitutional monarchy, with Charles III as king represented by a governor-general, and the definite article was dropped from the official name, though locals still say 'the Solomons'.
The first settlers came from the Bismarcks and New Guinea when low seas joined Buka, Bougainville and the southern islands into one landmass, sometimes called Greater Bougainville; rising water split it apart about 4000 to 3500 BC. Speakers of the Central Solomon languages may descend from those pioneers. Lapita seafarers seem to have skipped the main islands, settling Santa Cruz first before moving back west, and most of the 60 to 70 local languages now belong to the Oceanic branch of Austronesian. In the thirteenth century the Roviana people off New Georgia built many megalithic shrines.
Mendaña landed on Santa Isabel on 7 February 1568, and later reports linked the islands to the riches of the biblical King Solomon and his city of Ophir, giving them their name. His 1595 attempt at a colony on Nendö collapsed amid disease and hostility, and he died there that October. Two centuries later, items found on Tikopia in 1826 finally revealed that La Pérouse had been wrecked on Vanikoro in 1788.
From the 1840s islanders were recruited, often kidnapped, to labour in Australia, Fiji and Samoa, a trade known as blackbirding. Germany took the northern islands in 1886, and Britain declared its protectorate over the south in 1893, governing from Tulagi; in 1900 Germany ceded most of the north except Buka and Bougainville.
Source: Solomon Islands
