Around 4,000 tourists, scientists and star gazers descend upon the small remote island of Rapa Nui this weekend to witness a Total Solar Eclipse, the first humans ever to see one from this isolated location.
Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeastern most point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile annexed in 1888, Easter Island is widely famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people. It is a World Heritage Site (as determined by UNESCO) with much of the island protected within the Rapa Nui National Park. In recent times the island has served as a cautionary tale about the cultural and environmental dangers of overexploitation. Ethnographers and archaeologists now argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and the slave raiding that devastated the population in the 1800s had a much greater social than environmental impact.
