A large fire hit the Rapa Nui National Park located on Easter Island, where the iconic monoliths known as ‘moai’ lie, which were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. According to park administrators, the damage is ‘irreparable’, while authorities are still trying to understand the causes of the incident, although they suspect that it could have been an intentional act.
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is a strip of more than 150 square kilometers that is located in the Pacific Ocean, off the continental coast of Chile. This is, in fact, the largest island of the so-called insular Chile and is of great importance thanks to the legacy left by the traditional Rapanui people.
It is characterized by its great natural beauty because it is a volcanic island primarily composed of three main volcanoes: Terevaka, Poike and Rano Raraku. But above all, what distinguishes it from the other islands is that it has the vestiges of nearly 400 enormous anthropomorphic statues known as ‘moai’, thanks to which UNESCO declared the island a World Heritage Site in 2005.
Irreparable damage to Chilean cultural treasure
The island was involved in an unfortunate event, a large fire hit the region near Rano Raraku. Pedro Edmunds, who is the island’s mayor, told local media that the fire was such that the damage caused “cannot be repaired.”
For his part, Ariki Tepano, director of the Ma’u Henua community that is responsible for managing and caring for the national park, described the damage to the affected monoliths as “irreparable.” “The moai are completely charred and you can see the effect of the fire on them,” he added.
The undersecretary of Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, Carlina Pérez Dattari, said on her Twitter account that the serious fire destroyed more than 100 hectares of land.
For now, authorities have not yet determined the causes of the fire, but they suspect that it is a man-made act. This is because there have already been fires in the past, caused by horse and cow breeders in the region, who carry out ‘controlled’ burning of the island’s grasslands. “All the fires, at least the ones I know of on Rapa Nui, in my six decades, are caused by humans,” Edmunds said in an interview with the Chilean station Radio Pauta.
Unfortunately, the damage caused to the monoliths is not repairable. “The damage caused by the fire cannot be undone. The cracking of an original and emblematic stone cannot be recovered, no matter how many millions are invested in it,” Edmunds lamented.
The Rapa Nui National Park is an open-air museum, the largest in the world, and the administrators of the cultural site themselves have said that it does not have the necessary personnel for forest fire prevention efforts. They have demanded that the Chilean government so that events like this do not happen again.
Image credit: Rapa Nui National Park.