Kaledonie describes one island group — New Caledonia — as biology and ground rather than as a destination.
Every entry here is one thing that exists only in this archipelago, and the reason it does. The reason is usually the same: the island separated from Gondwana on the order of eighty million years ago, and a third of Grande Terre is peridotite whose weathered soil most plants cannot survive. Isolation and chemistry between them account for the kagu, the tool-making crow, Amborella, the maquis minier and the hyperaccumulators.
There are no itineraries on this site, no lists of things to do, no hotels, no prices and nothing addressed to a visitor. Where a practice belongs to living Kanak communities it is named as theirs and written in the present tense, because that is what it is.
How it is put together
Five sections, twenty entries, one register. Photographs are credited to their sources; the locator maps are drawn from real geometry at true coordinates rather than sketched. Species names follow current revisions, with the earlier name kept where the change matters to the reading.