Easter Island - City of Chile

Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. The island is a special territory of Chile. Easter Island is famous for its monumental statues, called moai , created by the Rapanui people. It is a world heritage site with much of the island protected within the Rapa Nui National Park.

The name "Easter Island" was given by the island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered Easter Island on Easter Sunday 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island.The island's official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, is Spanish for "Easter Island".

The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" or "Big Rapa", was coined by labor immigrants from Rapa in the Bass Islands, who likened it to their home island in the aftermath of the Peruvian slave deportations in the 1870s. However, Thor Heyerdahl has claimed that the naming would have been the opposite, Rapa being the original name of Easter Island, and Rapa Iti was named by its refugees.

There are several hypotheses about the "original" Polynesian name for Easter Island, including Te pito o te henua, or "The Navel of the World" due to its isolation. Legends claim that the island was first named as Te pito o te kainga a Hau Maka, or the "Little piece of land of Hau Maka". Another name, Mata-ki-Te-rangi, means "Eyes that talk to the sky


The history of Easter Island is rich and controversial. Its inhabitants have endured famines, epidemics, civil war, slave raids and colonialism, and the crash of their ecosystem their population has declined precipitously more than once. They have left a cultural legacy that has brought them fame out of all proportion to their numbers.

Contemporary to the arrival of the first settlers of Hawaii, 300-400 CE was published as a date for initial settlement of Easter Island. Although some scholars argue for initial settlement of 700-800 CE, there is an on-going study by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo that states: “Radiocarbon dates for the earliest stratigraphic layers at Anakena, Easter Island, and analysis of previous radiocarbon dates imply that the island was colonized late, about 1200 CE. Significant ecological impacts and major cultural investments in monumental architecture and statuary thus began soon after initial settlement.

Until the 1960s, the surviving Rapanui were confined to the settlement of Hanga Roa and the rest of the island was rented to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm until 1953. The island was then managed by the Chilean Navy until 1966 and at that point the rest of the island was reopened. In 1966, the Rapanui were given Chilean citizenship.

On July 30, 2007, a constitutional reform gave Easter Island and Juan Fernández Islands the status of special territories of Chile. Pending the enactment of a special charter, the island will continue to be governed as a province of the Valparaíso Region.