Moai statues on Easter Island: Mystical stone heads destroyed by fire

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Damaged by fire: A moai on Easter Island

Photo: Rapanui Municipality/AFP

With impassive faces, the Moai have been watching over Easter Island off the west coast of Chile for centuries.

Now some of the monumental landmarks seem to have been destroyed by a bush fire that has been raging on the island since Monday: Around a hundred hectares of land were affected by the fire, including several of the Moai, Chilean Deputy Minister of Culture Carolina Perez wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

According to them, the most severe damage was in the area of ​​the Rano Raraku volcano, where there are around 400 Moai.

The volcano in the east of the island is part of the Rapa Nui National Park, which covers around 40 percent of Easter Island and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

No one knows for sure why the aborigines placed the sculptures with the oversized heads - most of them with their backs to the sea.

Around 900 of them are mostly found near the coast of the island, which tourists can only reach after a long flight.

Ariki Tepano, director of the Ma'u Henua municipality, which is responsible for the management and maintenance of the national park, described the damage on the municipality's website as "irreparable" and that the affected moai were "completely burned".

The lack of volunteers has made it difficult to control the fires, the national park said.

Easter Island Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa told local radio station Radio Pauta that he believed the fire was "not an accident" and that "all fires on Rapa Nui are man-made."

"The damage done by the fire cannot be undone," he added.

"A crack in an original and iconic stone cannot be repaired, no matter how many millions of euros or dollars are invested."

»The living face of our ancestors«

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The 162.5 square kilometer isolated Easter Island is located more than 3500 kilometers off the Chilean coast in the South Pacific.

It was formed by three volcanoes, between them lies a fertile plain to the south.

The island was long inhabited by Polynesian peoples before Chile annexed it in 1888.

"The society of Polynesian origin that settled there around 300 AD established a vigorous, imaginative and original tradition of monumental sculpture and architecture, free from any external influence," writes Unesco on its website.

From the 10th to the 16th century, this society erected the Moai "and thus created an incomparable cultural landscape that fascinates people all over the world to this day".

Some of the moai, which are 4.5 meters high and weigh more than five tons, stand alone in the landscape, but sometimes also in groups in ceremonial structures, the so-called ahus.

"In the Rapa Nui language, the moai are called Moai Aringa Ora," reads the explanation on the national park page.

"The exact translation is 'the living face of our ancestors'."

It is believed that the statues, all male, were once intended to represent ancestors or famous chiefs of the Polynesian population.

They may have played a role in ritual acts.

They are mostly formed from tuff that comes from a quarry on the Rano Raraku volcano.

Many are unfinished, such as the largest, Te Tokanga, which measures 21 meters and is still anchored in the rock at the foot of Rano Raraku.

The island was only reopened to tourism at the beginning of August after a two-year corona ban.

Before the start of the corona pandemic, the island had around 160,000 visitors a year who arrived on two flights a day.

OJ/AFP