Easter Island
Discover Easter Island
Introduction
Rapa Nui — Easter Island — is the most remote inhabited island on earth. The Chilean mainland is three thousand seven hundred kilometres east, and the nearest inhabited land, Pitcairn, is two thousand kilometres west. Polynesian voyagers found it around the thirteenth century and then, as far as anyone can tell, had no further contact with anywhere for five hundred years.
What they built in that isolation is the reason to come. Close to a thousand moai — monolithic human figures, the largest over nine metres and eighty tonnes — were carved from volcanic tuff at the Rano Raraku quarry and moved, by means still argued about, to stone platforms around the coast. Nearly four hundred are still at the quarry in every stage of completion, including one that would have stood twenty metres. At Orongo, on the crater rim above the sea, the later birdman cult held an annual contest to bring back the first sooty tern egg from an islet offshore.
The island also produced rongorongo, a script found nowhere else and still undeciphered. The whole of it is a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, with visitor numbers, a thirty-day stay limit and compulsory guides in most of the park in force since 2018. Hanga Roa is the only town; the Tapati festival in February is the year’s main event.