Easter Island
When it comes to enigmatic locations, none are more mysterious than Easter Island, a name it would gain when Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen happened upon it while searching for Terra Australis on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722. What he discovered on one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world would intrigue and fascinate people for centuries to come.
It is believed that the Rapa Nui peoples of eastern Polynesia landed on this windswept island around the turn of the first millennium AD, but experts continue to disagree on this date. They would eventually carve and erect 887 monolithic stone statues (that we know of), called Moai. Despite being known as “Easter Island heads”, excavations have shown that they do in fact have torsos.
