Nusa Dua Travel Guide

The peninsula that became Nusa Dua was, until the 1970s, one of the poorest and most isolated corners of south Bali. The name means 'two islands' in Balinese — a reference to two small headlands connected to the mainland by narrow sandbars. The land was dry, scrubby and difficult to farm; the fishing villages of Bualu and Sawangan subsisted largely from the sea. There were no hotels, no roads worth the name, and no reason for outsiders to come. The offshore reef that now attracts resort guests kept the beach calm but also kept the fishing boats in, since launching through the surf was difficult.

Everything changed with a single document. In 1971 the Indonesian government, working with a World Bank feasibility study and the French firm SCETO, designated the peninsula as the site for a purpose-built international tourism enclave. The idea was deliberate and politically motivated: concentrate mass tourism in one controlled zone, collect the foreign exchange, and insulate the rest of Bali's Hindu culture from the disruptions that had already overwhelmed Kuta. The ITDC — Indonesian Tourism Development Corporation — was given authority over a 350-hectare plot. Existing villages were relocated. Roads were built. Electricity and water were piped in. The first resort hotel opened in 1972; by the early 1980s the Bali Hilton, Club Med and a dozen other international brands had taken plots along the new promenade.

The Nusa Dua model was controversial from the start — critics argued that isolating tourism from local communities prevented Balinese people from benefiting directly — but it also largely achieved its goal. The resort zone remains one of the cleanest and most orderly tourist areas in Southeast Asia, and the villages immediately outside the gate, particularly Bualu, developed a prosperous service economy supplying the hotels. Puja Mandala, built in 1997 with five houses of worship on a single plot, was a late addition to the zone and stands as perhaps its most distinctive monument — a government statement about religious tolerance built inside a precinct that was itself an act of government planning.