Easter Island Chile

Legendary

This remote island in the pacific has nearly 1,000 giant statues called moai.

Photo by Lee Coursey

About 400 statues are still sitting in the quarry where they were carved. Some are half-finished. Some are lying on their backs, still attached to the rock.

It looks like the carvers set down their tools one day and never came back. Nobody knows exactly why.

The island sits in the South Pacific, more than 3,500 kilometers west of Chile. It's one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, with no other island anywhere nearby.

Polynesian voyagers reached it by boat more than a thousand years ago. They called themselves and their island Rapa Nui, and they built a culture unlike any other.

The Rapa Nui carved nearly 900 giant stone figures called moai. Most stand about 4 meters tall and weigh around 13 tons, though some are far bigger.

They cut them from tuff, a soft rock formed from volcanic ash, at a quarry called Rano Raraku. Then they somehow moved them across the island and stood them upright on stone platforms called ahu.

The moai weren't gods. They represented important ancestors, and the Rapa Nui called them the living faces of their ancestors.

Almost every statue faces inland, looking over the villages rather than out to sea. They were meant to watch over their people.

A Dutch ship arrived in 1722 on Easter Sunday, which is how the island got its European name. The crew found the statues still standing.

The centuries that followed were hard. Slave raiders and diseases brought from overseas caused the population to collapse, and by the late 1800s only about 110 Rapa Nui people remained on the island.

Chile took control in 1888, and the island is a special territory of Chile today. The Rapa Nui population has since grown back into the thousands.

Walk through the Rano Raraku quarry to see the unfinished moai lying exactly where they were left. Visit Ahu Tongariki, where 15 restored statues stand shoulder to shoulder facing inland. Climb to the ceremonial village of Orongo, perched on the rim of a volcano crater above the ocean.