Espiritu Santo

Espiritu Santo ( Holy Spirit ) is the most important island of the archipelago of the Vanuatu in the Southern Pacific by its size and its diversity.

Its capital is Luganville.

History

She was baptized Austrialia del Espíritu Santo by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1606 in the honor of the dynasty reigning in Spain and with the Portugal, the Habsbourg, of Austrian origin ( Austria in Spanish).

It is the first island which discovered Quirós during its forwarding organized since the Peru bound for the Terra australis , of which it intended to take possession in the name of the crown of Spain. The navigator tried to found there a colony, baptized Nouvelle Jerusalem, but renonça shortly after because of the hostility of the indigenous S and the conflicts between the members of forwarding.

During the Second world war, the island of Espiritu Santo was an important military base of the the United States.

Forwarding Santo 2006

Since 2006, the island is the object of a research program by a French forwarding of study of the biodiversity, the Expédition Santo 2006, carried out by the professor Herve Guyader of the Université Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI), of which the goal is to index over several years the exhaustive whole of the environments terrestrial and marine.

On ten the first thousand listed species, it proves that approximately two thousand were unknown until now.

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