The volcanic field of Haikou

A city on a volcanic field

Just fifteen to twenty kilometres south-west of the city centre begins a landscape you don't expect on a tropical island: dozens of conical hills, dark porous rock and dense forest in between. Around forty volcanoes stand here on a good hundred square kilometres.

In 2006 the area, together with a volcanic field on the Leizhou peninsula across the strait, was declared a UNESCO Geopark. Hence the name Leiqiong: “Lei” for Leizhou, “Qiong” for Hainan. It's the only geopark of its kind in China lying on the edge of a tropical city.

How young is young?

The oldest volcanoes in the area are around a million years old. The most recent eruptions were only about ten thousand years ago — between eight and thirteen thousand years depending on the source. Geologically, that's yesterday. The volcanoes are considered dormant, not extinct.

The same heat from the depths that left craters here heats the water of the hot springs elsewhere on the island. If you've sat in the hot pool at Guantang, here you see the other side of the same underground.

Saddle Mountain

The best-known volcano is Ma'anling, “Saddle Mountain”, named after its shape. At 222.8 metres it's the highest point of Haikou and the entire north of the island. Its crater is about ninety metres deep and considered one of the best-preserved in the world.

A circular path leads round the crater rim to five viewpoints. From one you see, in clear air, over Haikou's high-rises to the strait; from another south over a sea of forested volcanic cones. Visibility is clearest early in the morning.

A crater without a lake

Although it rains a lot on Hainan, the crater has no lake. The water seeps away, because below the surface the ground is riddled like a sponge. Geologists have so far found 72 caves and more than thirty lava tubes, the longest over two kilometres. They formed when the surface of a lava flow solidified while liquid lava kept flowing underneath.

Most tubes aren't open to visitors. One of them, the “Cave of the Immortals”, lies a few kilometres from Saddle Mountain. There's an old inscription at the entrance, and when mud was cleared from the cave in the 1950s, smoothed patches were found in the rock that look like tool marks. Nobody knows who made them.

Down into the crater

A path leads from the rim down to the floor of a neighbouring crater. It's noticeably cooler down there; the basin is so big that supposedly ten thousand people could fit in it. Dense forest grows on the crater floor — around 1,200 plant species have been counted across the whole park.

Along the paths lie witnesses of the eruptions: volcanic bombs, lumps of lava that solidified in flight, flat lava cakes and porous scoria. Look closely and you can still see on some lumps the twisted shape they took on in the air.

Villages of lava

For many visitors the villages in the surrounding area are more exciting than the craters. The area is called Yangshan, “Goat Mountains”, after the black goats that graze among the stones and whose meat is considered a delicacy. Farmland is scarce, water scarcer still, and there was only one building material: volcanic rock.

So everything here is made of lava. Houses, courtyard walls, paths, wells, millstones, troughs, benches and graves — all hewn from the black stone and often stacked without mortar. Big water jars stand in front of many houses because the porous ground doesn't hold water.

Sanqing — a village from the Song era

The best-known of these villages is Sanqing, founded around eight hundred years ago in the Song era and on the list of China's traditional villages since 2014. About a hundred old stone houses survive. In the five old lanes you partly walk directly on solidified lava and can still make out the patterns of the former flows: rope-like ridges, columns and cracks.

A wall about two kilometres long and three metres high runs around the village, stacked by hand without mortar. At the village entrance stands a four-storey watchtower from the Republican era, from which the villagers defended themselves against Japanese troops. Bullet holes can still be seen in its walls.

Rongtang and the empty houses

Rongtang, another lava village with more than eight hundred years of history, is also only a few kilometres from the park. Here you see the other side: many families have moved into new houses or to the city, and the old village is inhabited mainly by older people. Moss and creepers grow over the walls.

Some houses have been modernised with cement and iron gates, others are decaying. In Sanqing, by contrast, a young villager returned from the city in 2013 to bring new life to the village with tours and guest rooms. Whether such attempts succeed is being decided right now — and you can see both paths just a few kilometres apart.

How to approach the day

Go to the park first in the morning, before haze and heat: crater rim, viewpoints, then down into the crater. Two to three hours are enough. If you don't want to walk everything, take the electric buses that run between the stations in the park. In the afternoon go to the lava villages, when the light falls slanting across the stone walls.

The villages are rural and buses are rare. Didi is easiest, but book the return trip in good time. People live in the villages — keep quiet and don't walk into courtyards uninvited.