Where to Stay in Baubau, Sulawesi Tenggara

What is Baubau known for?

Baubau served as the capital of the Sultanate of Buton and also as the seat of the colonial administration of Eastern Sulawesi, a double inheritance no other town on Buton island carries. One museum holds that record. The Buton Palace Museum is the single named site of Kota Baubau, and it keeps what the city retains of the Butonese court. Kendari took the capital in 1955.

What are the main landmarks in Baubau?

Baubau's whole register fits in one line. The Buton Palace Museum is the only site the record attaches to Baubau, and what it holds belongs to the Sultanate of Buton rather than to the city that followed the sultanate. The court gave it substance.

Kota Baubau was the cultural centre of the Butonese people, and the museum is where that standing survives in a building rather than in the administrative history that later moved to Kendari.

What is the history of Baubau?

The record starts in 1541. That year is the founding date carried for Baubau, set well before any of the administrative changes that gave the city its modern shape, and the Sultanate of Buton dominates what is written about the centuries after it. The sultanate ruled from here.

Baubau was its capital, the cultural centre of the Butonese people, and afterwards the seat of the colonial administration of Eastern Sulawesi, so authority sat on Buton island for a long stretch. Then it moved. The city was briefly the capital of the whole Southeast Sulawesi regency until 1955, when that status shifted to neighbouring Kendari and the island lost the weight it had held.

City status came much later. Baubau attained it on 21 June 2001, after Law Number 13 of 2001 was passed, which turned a historic centre into Kota Baubau in the formal sense for the first time. Trade carried it through.

The city is the economic centre of the Buton Island region, and only one city in Sulawesi Tenggara stands above it, a position built on the coast rather than on the offices Kendari took. The palace survives as a museum. Buton Palace Museum is the piece of the sultanate a visitor can still walk into, and it does the work that a whole quarter of older buildings does in cities with more of them left.

Where is Baubau?

Buton island carries the city. Baubau occupies the southwest coast of Buton in Sulawesi Tenggara, and of the 293.87 square kilometres inside its boundary about 30 square kilometres is water rather than ground. No corner of Baubau sits far from the water.

An island city south of the equator, Baubau sits in the tropical band, with open water on one side and the interior of Buton island on the other.

What is the climate of Baubau?

Coastal water keeps Baubau's temperatures even. Water along the southwest coast of Buton keeps the heat around Baubau within a narrow range, and the tropical band south of the equator supplies the rest of what the year does here. Damp air hangs over the city all year.

Anyone crossing between the water and the Buton Palace Museum learns that shelter matters more than the month does, since a city with about 30 square kilometres of water inside its boundary keeps humid air over it.

How do you get to Baubau?

Every approach crosses water. Baubau sits on Buton island, so arriving ends with a crossing, and Kendari is the name at the other end of most of those movements as the capital of Sulawesi Tenggara. The city faces southwest.

Its coast is the southwest side of Buton, where the traffic of the Buton Island region concentrates, and the Buton Palace Museum stands within the same built-up stretch that receives it.