The World's Most Remote Town — Easter Island's only settlement is surrounded entirely by Pacific Ocean, the nearest inhabited land 2,000km away, and the moai statues that guard the island's coastline are among the most enigmatic in human history
Hanga Roa is the sole town on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) — a Chilean territory 3,700km west of Chile's mainland and 2,000km east of Pitcairn Island, making it one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. The town of approximately 7,000 people serves as the base for exploring the island's extraordinary archaeological landscape: 1,000+ moai statues carved from volcanic tuff between roughly 1100–1600 CE by the Rapa Nui people, arranged on stone platforms (ahu) around the island's coastline. Ahu Tongariki (15 moai in a line against the Pacific, restored after a 1960 tsunami) and Ahu Akivi (7…
Easter Island was settled by Polynesian voyagers (from the Marquesas or Mangareva) around 800–1200 CE, making it one of the last places on Earth to be colonised by humans. The Rapa Nui civilisation built increasingly large moai statues over five centuries — the largest completed moai (Paro, at Ahu Te Pito Kura) stands 10 metres and weighs 82 tonnes. By the 17th century the civilisation had collapsed through a combination of deforestation, resource depletion, inter-clan warfare, and rat population explosion (rats arrived with the settlers and consumed palm seeds, preventing forest regeneration…