Boracay Private Island-Hopping Tour and Buffet Dinner

About Boracay

Boracay is a small dumbbell-shaped island in Aklan province, in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines, just off the northwest tip of Panay. Barely 7 kilometers long, it has become one of Asia's most celebrated beach destinations, anchored by the famous 4-kilometer crescent of fine white sand known as White Beach. The island's powdery sand is so distinctive that the name itself is said to come from the Inati words "bora" (bubbles) and "bocay" (white), though others trace it to the Aklanon "borac," meaning white cotton.

History and the Ati People

Long before resorts arrived, Boracay was home to the Ati, an Indigenous Negrito people who lived on the island for centuries, cultivating rice and raising goats. Spanish-era records refer to the island as "Buracay." For generations Boracay was a quiet fishing and farming community, almost unknown to outsiders until backpackers and a handful of European travelers discovered its beaches in the 1970s and 1980s. The Ati community's long struggle for ancestral land rights on their own island remains an important part of Boracay's story.

The 2018 Closure and Comeback

By the 2010s, runaway tourism had taken a heavy toll. Once called "the poster child for overtourism," the island suffered from untreated sewage being discharged into the sea. In April 2018 the Philippine government took the dramatic step of closing Boracay to tourists for six months for a full environmental rehabilitation. The island reopened in October 2018 with strict new rules: a 30-meter buffer zone from the waterline, no beachfront bonfires or vendors, capped visitor numbers, and upgraded drainage. The result is a cleaner, better-managed Boracay, and the surrounding reefs and quiet beaches you visit on this tour are part of what that rehabilitation worked to protect.