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Flores is one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, a group of islands in the eastern half of Indonesia. Administratively, it forms the largest island in the East Nusa Tenggara Province. The area is 14,250 km2. Including Komodo and Rinca islands off its west coast (but excluding the Solor Archipelago to the east of Flores), the population was 1,878,875 in the 2020 Census (including various offshore islands); the official estimate as of mid-2024 was 2,014,110.Badan Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 28 February 2025, Provinsi Nusa Tenggara Timur Dalam Angka 2025 (Katalog-BPS 1102001.53) The largest towns are Ende and Maumere. The name Flores is of Portuguese origin, meaning "Flowers".
Flores is located east of Sumbawa and the Komodo Islands, and west of the Solor Islands and the Alor Archipelago. To the southeast is Timor. To the south, across the Sumba Strait, is Sumba Island, and to the north, beyond the Flores Sea, is Sulawesi.
Among all islands containing Indonesian territory, Flores is the 10th most populous after Java, Sumatra, Borneo (Kalimantan), Sulawesi, New Guinea, Bali, Madura, Lombok, and Timor, and also the 10th biggest island of Indonesia.
Until the arrival of modern humans, Flores was inhabited by Homo floresiensis, a small archaic human.
The eastern part of the island, originally called Kopondai, was called Cabo das Flores (Cape of Flowers) by the Portuguese because of the flowering Delonix regia trees found there. That name remained.
As of 2015, partial remains of fifteen individuals have been found, and the dominant consensus is that these remains do represent a distinct species due to anatomical differences from modern humans. The most recent evidence shows that Homo floresiensis likely became extinct 50,000 years ago, around the time of modern human arrival to the archipelago.
Portuguese traders and missionaries came to Flores in the 16th century, mainly to Larantuka and Sikka Regency. Their influence is still discernible in Sikka's language, culture, and religion. The first Portuguese visit took place in 1511, through the expedition of António de Abreu and his vice-captain Francisco Serrão, en route through the Sunda islands.
The Dominican order played an important role on this island, as well as on the neighbouring islands of Timor and Solor. When the Dutch attacked the fortress of Solor in 1613, the population of the fort, led by the Dominicans, moved to the harbor town of Larantuka on the eastern coast of Flores. This population was mixed, of Portuguese and local islander descent and Larantuqueiros, Topasses, or, as the Dutch knew them, the 'Black Portuguese' (Zwarte Portugezen).
The Larantuqueiros, also known as Topasses, became the dominant sandalwood trading people of the region for the next 200 years. This group was observed by William Dampier, an English privateer visiting the Island in 1699:
In the western part of Flores, the Manggarai people came under the control of the Sultanate of Bima, in eastern Sumbawa. The Dutch effectively established their administration over western Flores in 1907. In 1929, the Bimanese sultanate ceded any control over Manggarai.
In 1846, the Dutch and Portuguese initiated negotiations to delimit their territories, but these negotiations led nowhere. In 1851, Lima Lopes, the new governor of Timor, Solor, and Flores, agreed to sell eastern Flores and the nearby islands to the Dutch in return for a payment of 200,000 Dutch guilder to support his impoverished administration. Lima Lopes did so without the consent of Lisbon and was dismissed in disgrace; however, his agreement was not rescinded. In 1854, Portugal ceded all its historical claims on Flores. After this, Flores became part of the territory of the Dutch East Indies.
During World War II, Great Britain, the Netherlands East Indies, and the United States imposed on Japan an embargo on rubber and oil and froze Japan's overseas funds. This was a strong incentive for Japan to get hold of the prosperous colonies of South East Asia, and its Operation "S" targeted the Lesser Sunda Islands – including Flores. On 14 May 1942, Labuan Bajo was the theatre of an amphibious landing by the Japanese Army landing force, and a Japanese Navy Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) landed at Reo. Japan occupied Flores until the end of the Pacific War. During that time, the Japanese administration and forces saw Christians as suspected Dutch sympathizers. They were exceedingly heavy-handed towards them in general, but not so much on Flores, where Christians were treated notably less harshly than in the neighbouring islands of Timor and Sumba. Remarkably, in Flores, the European priests and nuns were neither interned nor evicted throughout the occupation. According to Paul Webb (1986), this is because Florenese Christians were "too many to ignore": nearly half the population of Flores was Catholic and the Japanese, who could not afford to increase the size of their small occupation forces on the island, allowed European priests and sisters to stay at their posts rather than risking a general rebellion., cited in
After the war, Flores became part of independent Indonesia.
On 12 December 1992, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 2,500 people in and around Maumere, including islands off the north coast.
In 2017, two men were killed in Flores due to land disputes between warrior clans; the Mbehel, a West Manggarai Hill people, and the Rangko from Sulawesi island, who helped build Manggarai and were given land near Labuan Bajo by the Manggarai king.
The eight kabupaten are listed below from east to west, with their areas and their populations at the 2010 CensusBiro Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 2011. and the 2020 Census,Badan Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 2021. together with the official estimates as of mid-2024.
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The main towns on Flores are Maumere, Ende, Ruteng, Larantuka, and Bajawa, listed with their populations as of mid-2023.Badan Pusat Statistik, Jakarta, 28 February 2024, Provinsi Nusa Tenggara Timur Dalam Angka 2024 (Katalog-BPS 1102001.53)
The endemic fauna of Flores includes some rats (Murinae), some of which are now extinct, ranging from small-sized forms such as Rattus hainaldi, Paulamys, and the Polynesian rat (which possibly originated on the island), medium-sized such as Komodomys, and Hooijeromys, and giant such as Spelaeomys and Papagomys, the largest species of which, the still-living Papagomys armandvillei (Flores giant rat) is approximately the size of a rabbit, with a weight of up to 2.5 kilograms.
Flores was also the habitat of several extinct dwarf forms of the proboscidean (elephant relative) Stegodon, the most recent ( Stegodon florensis insularis) of which disappeared approximately 50,000 years ago. The island before modern human arrival was also inhabited by the giant stork Leptoptilos robustus and the vulture Trigonoceps.
A volcanic eruption in southeast Flores triggered earthquakes that killed at least 10 people as of 4 November 2024. Authorities warned of the possibility of more earthquakes in the coming days. "At Least 10 Killed in Indonesia After Volcano Erupts", The New York Times, Nov. 4, 2024
Djawanai (1983) precises that Ngadha somewhat deviates from Austronesian norms, in that words do not have clear and the grammatical processes are different; for example, the Austronesian family of languages makes an abundant use of prefixes or suffixes (which form new words by adding extensions either before or after root-words, such as per-form or child-hood), whereas the Ngadha and Keo languages use no prefixes or suffixes.
A few clans are not named after plants, but also have taboos on particular trees. For example, the Wa or Ana Wa people, whose name means "wind" or "wind people, children", claim the nage or tamarind tree as taboo; the Dhuge people bear the name of a former village and taboo the zita tree ( Alstonia scholaris); so do the Saga 'Enge people, whose name origin is not known.
The Nage people have plant totems but no animal totems—and, therefore, no taboo on killing and eating any animal. In contrast, their neighbours to the west, the Ngadha people, have 14 animal taboos and 16 plant taboos. Cited in .
This is not the archaeologist and art dealer Paul Arndt (1865–1937). The author, a missionary-ethnologist, lived among the Ngadha people from 1923 until he died in 1962. See
indigo grows in the temperate zones at middle elevations; It is the most commonly used plant base for blues and black dyes. Bar a few exceptions, it is always used in ikat.
Morinda citrifolia ( mengkudu, keloré in Lamalera), extensively used in the archipelago as a source of red dye, does not grow well on Flores and, according to Hoopen, is scarcely used here. But its use is reported in N'Dona (just east of Ende), where it is mixed with various including candlenut ( kemiri, very oily nut). Barnes also reports its use in the villages of Ili Mandiri, East Flores – and describes at length the arduous process for its preparation and application. Close by, weavers from the village of Larantuka may use the tree called gemoli for red dye.
Powdered leaves of a plant (tree?) called "lobah" are used in N'Dona (east of Ende) to obtain bright reds.
Yellow translates as kuma.
In the Sikka Regency, turmeric was used for producing yellow monochrome warp stripes, as well as orange or green stripes by overdyeing with either morinda or indigo; sometimes, mango bark was used for that purpose.
At Doka
in the 'Iwang Geté or Krowé region, a more durable deep mustard yellow is produced from turmeric, Mangifera indica bark, Morinda citrifolia ( mengkudu) tree bark (not root), jackfruit bark and powdered lime ( kapur sireh). Dyers of that region also mix turmeric with mango bark. Another yellow was obtained from a combination of mango bark and morinda, without the addition of oil or loba.
At Ile Mandiri (East Flores regency) and Loba Tobi
A beautiful yellow dye was obtained by boiling the wood chips of the 'yellowwood' tree, known locally as kajo kuma.
Manggarai people used to export Arcangelisia flava ( kayu kuning) to Java for the yellows in batik.
Another export (from Flores and Adonara) in the same domain was a hardwood tree called kajo kuma, literally 'yellow wood', which gives a yellow dye. In the 1980s, it was still brought to Lembata for that purpose.
Vitex pinnata as a dye is hardly used any longer in the Lesser Sunda Islands.
In some regions of Flores, such as East Flores and Ende, green is hardly found in any textile. Green warp stripes are most likely to be found in textiles produced in the area of Sikka Natar, and from Lamalera on Lembata.
It is produced almost exclusively by applying alternatively blue and yellow dyes, but in Lamalera region it is obtained by crushing leaves and using the green juice thus produced – notably from Annona squamosa ( dolima).
At Nita Kloang in the region of Krowé (Sikka regency), a green dye is made from the edible leaves of the Indian Coral tree ( dadap), which may include such species as Erythrina variegata, E. subumbrans, E. indica and Erythrina fusca). The tree is used as a shade plant for cocoa and coffee plants. For the dye, the leaves are crushed with turmeric root and powdered lime.
The earliest aniline dyes may have reached Indonesia in the 1880s, and brought to Flores by the Dutch steamers that serviced Ende and Larantuka. Up to the 1920s, they were likely only blue, red and magenta rather than green.
It is impossible to say how quickly synthetic greens were incorporated into the weavings of the Lesser Sunda Islands. Any green that was included in early weavings from around the turn of the century is likely to have faded to blue or brown by now (Brackman 2009, 61). Indeed, by the 1950s and 1960s, more modern lightfast synthetic greens were being used in the stripes in the Sikkanese sarongs. They continue to be used in this way today without undermining the region's traditional textile culture.
As of 2016, most areas of Flores still retain a degree of their former textile culture and still use synthetic green only sparingly, compared to other places that are losing or have lost their textile culture, such as Manggarai and Ngada. In Sikka, it seems that chemical green has been frequently used since at least the 1960s and probably earlier.
In the past, the whole Ilé Bura region was a major centre of weaving, which was an important contribution to family income. As of 2016, weaving is confined to just three villages – Lewo Tobi, Lewouran, and Riang Baring, the latter being the most active.
People of the Iwan geté region produce a very distinctive ikat cloth: the widest bands (called ina geté) bear such motifs as lizard ( teké), a circular motif seen on some antique plates ( pigan uben), spinning wheel ( jata selér), and pineapple flower ( petan puhun).
Traditionally, in the Ngadha region, everyday clothing consists of a plain, stark indigo sarong. However, there is also a type of ikat, often referred to as Bajawa ikat after its capital, that features primitive-style designs and is made with only indigo dye. One characteristic of this ikat is the very intense blue, which is unique to this piece and nowhere else in the archipelago; this color comes from the high concentration of indigo achieved through prolonged and repeated steepings of the cloth in the tincture. It also means that the motifs, made by ties on the warp, should have come out white but are more often of a very pale blue because the pigment bath has had time to seep into the yarn beyond the resist of the ties.
Another characteristic of Ngadha ikat is its motifs. Horses ( jara) are a frequent one, as they are a sign of high social rank; this ties up with the fact that decorated cloths were traditionally worn only by respected clan members. The particularity here is that they are executed as stick figures, by which they resemble some prehistoric cave drawings. This gives them a strikingly 'primitive' appearance and makes them highly sought-after items.
Most of the ikat on Flores is produced in villages located in the temperate, middle elevation zones, where indigo can be cultivated. The best known are Jerebuu
There are snorkelling and diving locations along the north coast of Flores, most notably Maumere and Riung. However, due to the destructive practice of local fishermen using bombs to fish, and locals selling shells to tourists, combined with the after-effects of a devastating tsunami in 1992, the reefs have slowly been destroyed.
Labuan Bajo, located on the western tip, is often used by tourists as a base to visit Komodo and Rinca islands. Labuan Bajo also attracts scuba divers, as whale sharks inhabit the waters around Labuan Bajo.
The Luba and Bena villages in Flores feature traditional houses. Bena is also noted for its Stone Age .
Larantuka, on the isle's eastern end, is known for its Holy Week festivals.
In recent years, local tourist firms around Kelimutu have begun promoting cycling tours around Flores, some of which take up to five or six days, depending on the particular program.
In the 1980s, cotton crops were encouraged to generate income for the poorer subsistence farmers. It is planted in low-lying areas of the island.
Jackfruit, which occurs throughout the Indonesian archipelago – and elsewhere -, is specifically cultivated in Manggarai and Sikka Regency regencies, and probably in every other regency.
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