27°07'S · 109°21'W

Easter
Island

South Pacific · 2024

/ Introduction

A volcanic triangle of 163 km² that rose from the South Pacific in complete geographic solitude, and grew one of the most original civilisations on the planet.

The moai still watch over an island that has already lived through one collapse. The Rapa Nui are rebuilding their language, their forest and their authority over their own land.

Population: 7,750Census of 2017
Area: 163 km²
Settled: c. 1200 ADBy Polynesian voyagers
Isolation: 2,075 kmTo the nearest inhabited island
Country: ChileSpecial Territory of Easter Island
Language: Rapa NuiSeverely endangered — UNESCO
Issues: Coastal erosion and sea-level rise, freshwater scarcity, language loss, deforestationCoastal erosion, freshwater scarcity

/ About

About the island

More than 3,500 km from the Chilean coast and over 2,000 km from the nearest inhabited island, Rapa Nui is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. A volcanic triangle of about 164 km², it rose from the South Pacific in complete geographic solitude and, over the better part of a millennium, grew one of the most original and most argued-over civilisations on the planet.

This is where the moai stand: almost a thousand monolithic statues carved between the 13th and 16th centuries, representing the deified ancestors of the community and holding the mana, the spiritual energy called on to protect the Rapa Nui people. Many of them were erected on stone platforms called ahu, and more than 200 of these line the coast. The Rapa Nui National Park has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995, the first cultural World Heritage Site in Polynesia. Yet the moai tell only part of the story.

Rapa Nui is not an open-air museum. It is a living study of what happens when an isolated community meets the limits of its own territory, and of how a more deliberate relationship with the land, the water and the sea can be rebuilt from those limits.