Rapa Nui National Park

Listen first. The wind comes off the Pacific without stopping, and it carries salt and the smell of dry grass. Underfoot, the ground is dark and rough. It is volcanic rock, broken into stones the colour of rust and charcoal. Horses graze loose on the slopes. And then, on the horizon, you see them... stone figures standing in a row with their backs to the sea. They have stood here for centuries, and they watch the land, not the ocean.

Welcome to Rapa Nui National Park. It covers a large part of Easter Island, the place its own people call Rapa Nui. This is one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. The nearest populated land is more than two thousand kilometres away. UNESCO listed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1995. Today it protects the statues, the stone platforms, the quarries and the ceremonial sites that make this island unlike anywhere else.

The statues are called moai. Nearly nine hundred of them are known across the island. Most were carved from one source — a soft volcanic stone called tuff, cut from the walls of the crater at Rano Raraku. The moai represent ancestors. They were raised on stone platforms called ahu, which often held the bones of the dead. A family or clan raised its ancestors to look over the living, and to share their spiritual power with the village.

That power had a name: mana. It is a Polynesian idea, found from Hawaii to New Zealand. Mana means a kind of sacred strength that flows from ancestors and chiefs. This explains something most visitors notice but cannot place. Almost every moai faces inland, toward where the villages once stood. The statues were not built to guard the coast. They were built to watch over their own people.

Here is the first surprise. Many of the heads you see in photographs are not just heads. At Rano Raraku, many moai stand buried up to their shoulders or chests in soil that has washed down the slope over centuries. Archaeologists have dug around some of them. Below the ground, they found full torsos, and on the backs of some statues, carved designs. The famous faces are only the visible part of the story.

Rano Raraku itself feels like a workshop that the workers left one afternoon and never came back to. Unfinished statues still lie in the rock face, some barely outlined, some almost ready to be cut free. One of them is far larger than any moai that was ever moved. Walking the trail here, you can see each stage of the work, from a rough shape in the stone to a finished face with a long nose and a heavy brow.

How did the islanders move statues weighing many tonnes across rough ground, without wheels or large animals? Rapa Nui oral tradition gives a simple answer. The moai walked. Locals say the statues moved by the power of mana. For a long time, outsiders treated this as a myth. But in recent years, researchers tested an idea. With ropes tied to the head, small teams rocked an upright replica from side to side, and it shuffled forward. The old story may describe something real.

The largest platform on the island is Ahu Tongariki, on the southeast coast. Fifteen moai stand on it in a single line. Their history is not calm. In 1960, a huge earthquake in Chile sent a tsunami across the Pacific. The wave struck this coast and threw the statues inland. In the 1990s, a restoration project with Japanese support raised them again. The line you see is both very old and quite recent.

Look at the tops of some statues and you will see a second stone, a red cylinder. These are called pukao, often described as topknots or headdresses. They are made from a red volcanic stone called scoria, from a different quarry at Puna Pau. So the islanders worked two quarries for one monument. Some moai also once had eyes, made of white coral with dark stone pupils. A restored eye at Anakena shows how alive these faces once looked.

Now the second surprise. There is one well-known exception to the rule that the moai face inland. At Ahu Akivi, seven statues stand away from the coast and look out toward the ocean. According to one popular tale, they represent seven young explorers sent ahead by the island's legendary first chief, Hotu Matu'a, to find a new home. Whether that story is true or not, these seven stand apart from all the rest.

Over time, island life changed. The age of the moai gave way to a new ritual centred on the village of Orongo, high on the rim of the Rano Kau crater. Here, each year, young men raced down the cliff, swam through dangerous water to a small islet, and waited for the first egg of a seabird, the sooty tern. The man whose sponsor received that egg became the Birdman, the Tangata Manu. Carvings of bird-headed figures still cover the rocks at Orongo.

The outside world arrived late. A Dutch expedition reached the island on Easter Sunday in 1722, which is where the English name comes from. What followed was hard. Disease, slave raids and outside control brought the population close to collapse in the nineteenth century. Chile annexed the island in 1888. Some statues were taken abroad, including one now held in the British Museum in London. In recent years, the Rapa Nui community has taken a direct role in managing this park, and the islanders call for those statues to come home.

So stand here a moment longer. Feel the wind push against your jacket. Look at the stone faces, worn smooth by rain and salt, and remember that they still mean something to living families on this island. These are not ruins of a vanished people. They are ancestors. As you walk back along the path, keep your eyes on the grass. You may notice a fallen stone, a carved curve, a line of rock that once held something sacred.