Roofing in Tonga

Tonga shares the western Polynesian tradition of the fale, a lashed timber building with a large thatched roof, but today almost all Tongan homes have metal roofs. The fale form and the craft of lalava (decorative lashing) live on mainly in churches, halls and tourism buildings. Tropical Cyclone Gita in 2018, the strongest to hit Tongatapu since 1982, destroyed or damaged thousands of houses.

Climate and hazards

Tonga lies in the South Pacific cyclone belt. Cyclone Gita passed over Tongatapu and ʻEua around 11 pm on 12 February 2018; it was the strongest cyclone to hit those islands since Cyclone Isaac in 1982. A government and World Bank assessment estimated its total effect at about US$164.1 million, or 37.8% of 2017 GDP. More than 800 houses were destroyed and about 4,000 damaged, and housing accounted for about 53% of all damage costs, the largest of any sector.

Roofing history

Tongan history is anchored by monumental stone architecture as well as timber building: the langi at Muʻa, large low stone pyramids associated with the Tuʻi Tonga, whose maritime power peaked around 1200-1500 AD, are prominent monumental stone structures. Methodist missionaries arrived in 1822 and the first chapel, built in 1826, was itself a fale. In the late 19th century the Royal Palace and the old Parliament building were prefabricated in New Zealand and shipped to Nukuʻalofa.

Architect and writer Bill McKay has observed that few fale are now used as dwellings in Tonga, possibly because the main island is a few degrees cooler than elsewhere in the region. The village of Kolovai shows the fale evolving with Western materials and methods.

Traditional and vernacular roofs

• Fale: lashed timber house with a large roof, related to the Samoan fale.
• Lalava: Tongan decorative lashing, now seen in churches and resort-style buildings such as those on Fafa island.
• The Pelehake Free Wesleyan Church (1986, architect George Moala) uses a customary lashed-pole structure.

Roofing today

In the 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, 95.4% of household records listed metal or tin as the main roof material; cardboard (1.8%), wood planks (1.5%) and cement (0.6%) made up most of the rest, and thatch was almost absent. These are unweighted case counts from the survey sample.

Codes, standards and regulation

Building is regulated under the Building Control and Standards Act 2002. The National Building Code was first issued in 2001 and updated in 2007; 2018 revisions remained in draft according to a regional review of Pacific building codes.

Notable roofs

• Pelehake Free Wesleyan Church (1986), with a lashed-pole roof structure.
• Royal Palace, Nukuʻalofa, a late-19th-century prefabricated timber building from New Zealand.

Local roofing terms

• Fale: house. Lalava: decorative structural lashing.
• Langi: royal stone tombs (not roofs, but key heritage structures).

Sources and gaps

No information on domestic roofing manufacturers was found in published sources.

Roof-material tables from the 2016 and 2021 censuses were not found and published sources on traditional Tongan thatch materials are limited.