Easter Island Travel

Discover Easter Island with inventia

With the ships Arend, Thienhoven, Africaansche Galey and a total crew of 260 men, Jakob Roggeveen left Amsterdam on June 16, 1721, and reached the Pacific in January 1722 after rounding Cape Horn. During his circumnavigation of the globe, he discovered the Polynesian island of Rapa Nui for Europe on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, and named it Paasch Eyland (Easter Island).

Thetravelogue written by Carl Friedrich Behrens, a German who accompanied the expedition, made the island and its statues famous throughout Europe.

It was really a matter of luck to come across this small and completely isolated island in the middle of the vast Southeast Pacific between the South American mainland and the Polynesian South Seas. Its volcanic peak is the only one of a 2,500 km long submarine mountain range to rise out of the sea. All other volcanoes in the Salas y Gómez Basin lie below the sea surface.

Easter Island is famous for its approximately 880 monumental stone sculptures, known as moai, as well as its preserved Polynesian and Maori traditions and culture. Politically, it belongs to Chile, but geographically it belongs to Polynesia (like Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Moorea, for example).

Since 1995, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site as Rapa Nui National Park.

Their exposed location is what makes them so special:

A language that is only spoken here developed from a Polynesian dialect. The coral reefs characteristic of many Pacific islands are absent here, and the coast drops steeply to a sea depth of 3,000 meters. The coastline is rocky and rugged. At the southwestern tip and in the east, on the Poike Peninsula, steep cliffs up to 300 meters high rise up. And yet, when you swim in the turquoise Pacific Ocean on the white beach with a view of a row of moai, you get that South Sea feeling.