The fishermen live on boats and floating wooden houses in the core-zone of Ha Long Bay. The fishing villages were formed in the beginning of the nineteenth century. There are four residential areas of fishermen living on the bay, about 400 households totaling approximately 1.000 people. The people of the village operate as a close-knit family and their main livelihood is fishing and aquaculture. The fishing communities who live on the bay still retain their own special culture.
Today, the greatest challenges to life in the fishing villages are related to the environment, especially climate change, as increasingly violent storms kill fish or damage equipment. They will need to adapt to rising seawater and the effects of tourism in the area. Pollution is also a concern, including byproducts of construction work and industrial runoff enter the water, trash from locals and less conscious tourists, and from the villagers themselves, who have no toilets.
Ha Long Bay is located within the Quang Ninh Province of Vietnam. Situated in the Gulf of Tonkin, the site includes some 1600 islands and islets forming a spectacular seascape of limestone pillars in an area of around 1,553 sq km. Because of their precipitous nature, most of the islands are uninhabited and relatively unaffected by human influence.
Ha Long Bay possesses a tremendous diversity of caves and other landforms which derive from the unusual geomorphological process of marine invaded tower karst. In recognition of its remarkable scenic quality, Ha Long Bay was inscribed as a
UNESCO natural World Heritage site (1994) and the New7Wonders of Nature (2011).
