Phan Thiet Overview
Phan Thiet is the capital city of Binh Thuan province in the southern central coast of Vietnam. It is a charming beach city, offering travelers a wide range of activities, both on land and on the water. The city encompasses a 58km long coastline with many beautiful beaches. Phan Thiet City boasts an abundance of Vietnamese and international restaurants, beautiful beach resorts, inexpensive hotels, water sports activities. The local cuisine is diverse and unique in many ways. Its proximity to Ho Chi Minh city, Phan Thiet is one of the best suggested places to visit, both for Ho Chi Minh City residents and travelers.
The community of Phan Thiet, or ‘Hamu Lithit’ was called by the Cham people who lived in this region before it became a part of Vietnam, has existed for hundreds of years. However, before the 1990s, Phan Thiet was just a small backwater town that was known primarily for the cultivation of dragon fruit and the production of fish sauce. The first resorts began to appear along beaches in the Phan Thiet in the early 1990s.
Then in 1995, Phan Thiet popped up in hundreds of television programs and news articles over the world. A rare solar eclipse had been predicted by scientists and they said that one of the best places in the world to see the whole eclipse was on Rang beach, just a some kilometers northeast of Phan Thiet city. At the time, Rang beach had only one good resort on it; the newly opened Coco Beach Resort and there were also some cheap guest houses, but it was primarily just a some hundred fishermen and home to a small residential community and their families centered around Ham Tien market, approximately 15 km northeast of Phan Thiet city. On 24 October 1995, many foreigners and astronomers came to this area to watch the solar eclipse. Guidebooks directed the travelers and astronomers to the beach in front of Mui Ne Bay, uncorrected call Ham Tien is ‘Mui Ne’ and Rang beach is ‘Mui Ne beach’. From that day onwards, travelers have mistakenly called to everything east of the city centre as Mui Ne, while Mui Ne and Ham Tien are actually two different wards of Phan Thiet! Mui Ne was famous from there.
Phan Thiet was officially designated as a city in 1999. The city had a population of about 200,000 people at the time, but when the city was united, it annexed a number of nearby communities, including Mui Ne, Ham Tien, Hon Rom, Thien Nghiep and Tien Thanh. The 18 wards and communes that were created the Phan Thiet population to 400,000 people. Each area of Phan Thiet has its own draw and unique characteristics and there are plenty of things for travelers to enjoy and do in this area.
