Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan, Indonesia — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan known for?

Makassar, its capital and the largest city in eastern Indonesia, spreads along the Makassar Strait and grew rich on the sea trade of the Bugis and Makassarese, whose pinisi schooners still carry cargo across the archipelago. Inland and high to the north lie the Toraja, famous for carved tongkonan houses with soaring roofs and days-long funeral rites. Bantimurung adds another draw, its limestone valleys near Maros thick with butterflies.

Rice terraces and karst towers fill the ground between.

Where is Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan?

Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan occupies the south-western arm of Sulawesi, the long peninsula that reaches down toward the Flores Sea. Water frames it on three sides. The Makassar Strait runs along its western coast, the deep waterway that separates Sulawesi from Borneo.

To the east the land curves around the Gulf of Bone, the wide bay that almost splits the island in two. The Flores Sea closes the southern tip. Only the north is land-bound, sharing ridges with Central Sulawesi and West Sulawesi.

Inland, the country climbs. The Latimojong range rises in the north, and its peak Rantemario stands as the highest point on the whole island of Sulawesi. Rivers drain the ranges onto a central lowland of paddy and shallow water, where Lake Tempe spreads across the Bugis plains near Sengkang.

Nearer Makassar the ground breaks into the Maros karst, a field of grey limestone towers threaded by rivers and caves, and the butterflies of Bantimurung fill its valleys. Hundreds of small islands lie scattered off the coast in the Makassar Strait and the Flores Sea. It is a province of mountain, water and stone.

What is Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan like?

The province is really the meeting of three peoples. In the lowlands and along the coast live the Bugis and the Makassarese, Muslim seafarers whose reputation for trade and boatbuilding carried their pinisi ships across the whole archipelago. Their shipwrights still shape hulls by hand on the beaches at Tanah Beru.

The Bugis carry one of the longest works of world literature in their Sureq Galigo, a vast creation epic sung at ceremonies. Makassarese and Buginese are spoken beside the national Indonesian across the plains. In the interior towns, Bugis weavers still work silk on hand looms.

High in the mountains the mood shifts. The Toraja kept their own path, and their villages of tongkonan houses, roofs curved like boat prows, stand apart from the coastal towns below. Death is the great occasion here.

A Toraja funeral, the Rambu Solo, can run for days and draws whole villages to feast and sacrifice buffalo before the dead are laid in graves cut into cliff faces. The same cool highlands grow the Arabica that leaves the island as Toraja coffee. The coast trades and the highlands remember.

What is the history of Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan?

Power here grew from the sea. The twin kingdoms of Gowa and Tallo built Makassar into one of the great trading ports of the eastern archipelago, drawing spice traders from across the world before the Dutch arrived. Its ruler Sultan Hasanuddin fought the Dutch East India Company so hard they called him the Rooster of the East.

The war ended in defeat. The Treaty of Bongaya in 1667 forced Gowa to yield, and the Dutch rebuilt the old fortress as Fort Rotterdam to hold the coast. Sulawesi Selatan took its modern provincial form in 1960.

What is the climate of Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan?

The lowlands stay hot all year. Sulawesi Selatan sits deep in the tropics, so Makassar and the coastal plains run warm and humid through every month, with the year split into a wet season and a dry one rather than into summer and winter. The northwest monsoon brings the heaviest rain to the Makassar Strait coast, while the Gulf of Bone side catches its downpours at the opposite turn of the year.

Up in the Toraja highlands it is cooler and wetter. Latimojong can turn cold.

How do you get to Provinsi Sulawesi Selatan?

Nearly everyone flies into Makassar. Sultan Hasanuddin International Airport, out toward Maros on the edge of the city, is the busiest air hub in eastern Indonesia and takes flights from Jakarta, Surabaya and Bali. Ships still matter here.

Makassar's harbour is a main call for the inter-island ferries that thread the eastern seas, a role the Bugis have played for centuries. From the airport the real journey begins, a long climb by road north through the hills to Rantepao and the Toraja country.