Twelve Indonesian Towns from Meulaboh to Manokwari

Meulaboh sits on the western coast of Sumatra, about 245 kilometers southeast of Banda Aceh, and is the capital of West Aceh Regency with about 67,000 residents. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed roughly 80 percent of its buildings, and aid organizations afterward used the town as a staging post for relief along the coast.

Bagansiapiapi lies on the Rokan River delta in Riau across the strait from Malacca, settled by Chinese immigrants in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its population is still about 59.55 percent ethnic Chinese, and at its peak it ranked as the world's second-highest fish producer after Bergen.

Rangkasbitung is the seat of Lebak Regency in Banten, at the confluence of the Ciberang and Ciujung rivers, and it connects to Jakarta's commuter rail network. Its Multatuli Museum, opened in 2018, documents the author Eduard Douwes Dekker, who wrote under the pen name Multatuli.

Cianjur was founded in 1677 under its first leader R. A. Wiratanudatar I and lies on the old route between Jakarta and Bandung. Earthquakes mark its recent history, including a magnitude 7.0 quake in 2009 and a magnitude 5.6 quake in 2022 that killed more than 330 people.

Indramayu on the north coast of West Java grew from the Dermayu Sultanate, founded in 1478 after independence from Majapahit and absorbed into Dutch East India Company rule in 1770. The region was Indonesia's leading rice producer through the 1980s and 1990s and is still known for mangosteens and mangoes.

Jepara is a north coast town of Central Java known as the World Carving Centre for its teak wood carving tradition. In the 16th century it was an important port under Queen Kalinyamat, which fought repeated conflicts with Portuguese Malacca between 1513 and 1574, and it is the birthplace of the women's rights pioneer Kartini.

Banyuwangi stands at the eastern tip of Java facing the Bali Strait, backed by the Ijen Plateau. It was the capital of Blambangan, the last Hindu kingdom on Java, which survived Mataram's expansion in the early 1600s, and in 1871 it was linked by undersea cable to the Australian telegraph line at Darwin.

Singaraja is a port town in northern Bali and the second-largest town on the island, with a mid-2022 population of 153,930. It was the Dutch colonial administrative capital of Bali from 1849 to 1960 and houses Gedong Kirtya, one of only two libraries of lontar palm-leaf manuscripts in the world.

Ende lies on the southern coast of Flores and is where Sukarno was exiled in 1934. There, sitting under a breadfruit tree, he conceived Pancasila, the founding philosophy of Indonesia. The area also saw resistance to Dutch rule in the wars of Watu Api and Mari Longa of 1916 to 1917.

Larantuka sits at the eastern end of Flores, where Portuguese traders settled before 1600 and made it a regional center of the sandalwood trade, giving rise to the Eurasian Larantuqueiros. The overwhelmingly Roman Catholic town is known for Holy Week processions built around statues brought by 16th century Portuguese missionaries.

Luwuk is the capital of Banggai Regency in Central Sulawesi, with 34,849 residents at the 2020 census. It has a tropical savanna climate that makes it one of the driest places in Indonesia, and its population includes the indigenous Saluan, Balantak and Banggai peoples.

Manokwari is the capital and largest town of West Papua province on the Bird's Head Peninsula of Western New Guinea, with about 132,300 residents in 2024. Early European visitors called it Dory, Dorery or Dorey, and it is one of only seven Indonesian provincial capitals without formal city status.