Island Stories

BBC World Service reporters travel to six islands to discover what makes them some of the most scenic, culturally rich and diverse destinations on the planet. Among the people featured are the gold-diggers of Buru in Indonesia, and the rastafarians of the Colombian islet of Providencia.

In the first edition, Andriy Kravets heads to Khortytsia, Ukraine, which lies in the middle of the Dnieper river and is host to icons of Ukrainian national identity including the fabled Zaporozhian Cossacks.

The BBC African Service's Alex Jakana presents a profile of Bugala, the biggest of Uganda's archipelago of islands in Lake Victoria.

Laura Plitt looks at the remotest, most neglected of the Canary Isles, El Hierro, which has become the world's greenest island thanks to the ingenuity of its people.

Hernando Alvarez visits Old Providence, one of the few Caribbean islands that has not been touched by tourism, and where life is dominated by the laid-back Rastafarian way.

Zuhura Yunus details the lives led by the people of Anjouan, who have a precarious existence despite the enveloping natural beauty of the Comoros Islands, near Mozambique.

Kiki Siregar relates the fortunes of the once-impoverished former penal colony of Buru, Indonesia, which has been transformed since the discovery of gold in the mountains.