Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle.
Easter Island is famous for its eight hundred and eighty-seven extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people.
Polynesian people settle on Easter Island in the first millennium CE, and create a thriving culture, as evidenced by the moai and other artifacts.
Human activity, the introduction of the Polynesian rat and overpopulation leads, however, to gradual deforestation and extinction of natural resources, which causes the demise of the Rapa Nui civilization.
The island's population has dropped to two thousand to three thousand by the time of European arrival in 1722, from a high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier.
Diseases carried by European sailors and Peruvian slave raiding of the 1860s further reduce the Rapa Nui population, down to one hundred and eleven in 1877.
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world.
The nearest inhabited land (fifty residents) is Pitcairn Island two thousand and seventy-five kilometers (one thousand two hundred and eighty-nine miles) away, and the nearest continental point lies in central Chile, three thousand five hundred and twelve kilometers (two thousand one hundred and eighty-two miles) away.
Chile annexes Easter Island as a special territory in 1888.
