People settled this stretch of the Sơn valley a long time before anybody thought to sell tickets. Four villages — Cù Lạc, Phong Nha, Gia Tịnh and Xuân Sơn — formed here between roughly the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and under the Nguyễn dynasty they were administered together as part of Cao Lao commune in Bố Trạch district. It is good country for a village and difficult country for anything larger: a narrow ribbon of alluvium along the river, hemmed by the grey limestone of the Kẻ Bàng massif, with rolling hills behind. After the August Revolution the area was consolidated as Sơn Trạch commune, and in June 1955 Sơn Trạch was split into four. Farming was the living. It stayed the living for a very long time.

During the 1960s the war arrived and reorganised everything around the river crossing. Xuân Sơn was where men, weapons and vehicles headed for the trail got over the Sơn, and the work was done at night by people who understood exactly what would happen if the crossing were spotted. Equipment was moved into the mouth of Phong Nha Cave before dawn and brought out again after dark. Bombing was continuous in this province and a river crossing is an obvious target; keeping it open was dangerous work done largely by local people, and the villages nearby lived with the consequences of a supply line running through their fields. Vietnam recognised Xuân Sơn ferry as a national special historical site in 2013. The visitors who queue at the same landing stage today are mostly unaware they are standing on it.

For most of the modern era this place was called Sơn Trạch, and the cave was a feature within it. Then the balance inverted. Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng was inscribed by UNESCO in 2003, the tourism that followed attached itself to the cave's name rather than the commune's, and on 10 January 2020, by Resolution 862/NQ-UBTVQH14, Sơn Trạch commune was converted whole into a township and renamed Phong Nha, after the cave. It is not often that a town takes its name from a hole in a mountain, but the economics were unarguable: by 2020 the cave was the reason anybody outside Quảng Bình had heard of the place at all.

The commune is the service centre for the entire national park, and the list of what visitors come for now runs well past the original cave: Tiên Sơn in the hills above it, the Moọc water spring, the Chày River and the Dark Cave. Guesthouses, boat crews, guides, porters and drivers have grown up around all of it, layered onto an economy that is still substantially agricultural. Both halves matter. Tourism here is highly seasonal, sensitive to weather and to events on the other side of the world, and the rice and the livestock are what remain when the boats stop running. It is also worth saying plainly what the change involved: a generation whose parents took their income out of the forest — timber, agarwood, wildlife — now largely takes it from people who come to look at the forest instead.

In the summer of 2025 Vietnam rebuilt its local government from the ground up, and Phong Nha was reorganised twice inside three weeks. On 12 June, Quảng Bình province was dissolved and merged into Quảng Trị, the enlarged province keeping the southern name and taking Đồng Hới as its capital. Then, on 1 July, Phong Nha township was combined with the communes of Lâm Trạch, Xuân Trạch and Phúc Trạch under Resolution 1680/NQ-UBTVQH15 to form a single new Phong Nha commune: 358.1 square kilometres, a little over 39,000 people, and a boundary that now takes in a serious portion of the karst itself. In five years the place has gone from a rural commune, to a township, to a commune again, and moved provinces without anyone leaving home. The cave has not moved at all.