Hòn Tre island

Hòn Tre is the largest island in Nha Trang bay and the thing that blocks the horizon when you stand on Trần Phú and look out to sea. Measured back from the OpenStreetMap coastline it runs 11.5 km east to west and 6.3 km across, with more than 50 km of shoreline and an area above thirty square kilometres — larger than the whole of central Nha Trang. In the middle stands a 482-metre mountain. Almost no visitor knows that, because the part of the island visitors see is a flat strip of shore at the western end.

The most useful thing to know about this island is that it has two ends, and they have nothing to do with each other. The western end is Vinpearl: VinWonders, Vinpearl Harbour, the resorts, a golf course, and the upper station of the cable car across the bay. The eastern end is Bích Đầm, a fishing village. The two sit 8.8 km apart in a straight line and no road joins them: the island's entire road network in OpenStreetMap sits inside the resort grounds — footpaths, service roads, a go-kart track — with nothing crossing the mountain.

So in practice “going to Hòn Tre” means two entirely different trips, leaving from two different piers in town. For the western end you take the cable car from Cầu Đá at the southern end of Trần Phú, or a boat from the same landing — about fifteen minutes, and the trip nearly every visitor makes. For Bích Đầm you take a speedboat from Vĩnh Trường port, about thirty minutes, and it is the trip almost nobody makes. A ticket for one is no use for the other.

At the western end, what the island gives you that the city cannot is the view in reverse. Standing on Hòn Tre you look west, at the Trần Phú hotel strip with the mountains behind it — the picture you never get from the shore. That is why Wave Bar on the island is worth a late afternoon, and why the cable-car ride is worth taking even if you do not intend to enter the park.

One misreading worth clearing up, because this site itself once got it wrong: Hòn Tằm is not part of Hòn Tre. Hòn Tằm is its own island to the south, reached by boat from the Nha Trang tourist pier rather than across from Hòn Tre. In the same way Hòn Mun and Bãi Tranh on Hòn Miễu are separate islands. The bay holds many; Hòn Tre is simply the biggest, not the one containing the rest.

Administratively the island sits in phường Nha Trang, the name adopted on 1 July 2025; before that it was phường Vĩnh Nguyên. That is worth knowing when you read an older address on a ticket or a booking page: many still print “Vĩnh Nguyên”, and it is the same place rather than a different one. There are convenience stores inside the VinWonders and Vinpearl Harbour grounds, so a day here does not oblige you to carry water across from the mainland.