Easter Island fire causes ‘irreparable’ damage to sacred statues

A devastating fire has charred several of the famous statues on Easter Island, officials have said.

The country’s cultural heritage undersecretary, Carolina Perez Dattari, said that the blaze that started on Monday engulfed an unknown number of statues — also known as moai — and affected nearly 60 hectares (148 acres) of land.

The moai were carved by a Polynesian tribe more than 500 years ago. Easter Island has nearly 1,000 of these statues.

Ariki Tepano, a Ma’u Henua park community director, said that the damage was “irreparable and with consequences beyond what your eyes see”.

New Zealand’s Stuff quoted him as saying: “The moai are totally charred, and you can see the effect of the fire upon them.”

The mayor of Easter Island, Pedro Edmunds Pao, told Radio Pauta that “the damage caused by the fire can’t be undone. The cracking of an original and emblematic stone cannot be recovered, no matter how many millions of euros or dollars are put into it”.

Mr Pao added that he believed that the fire was started deliberately and was not an accident and that “all the fires on Rapa Nui are caused by human beings”.

Easter Island had been closed to tourists until three months ago due to pandemic restrictions.

The are some 1,000 giant moai and carvings, the largest of which weighs 74 tonnes and stands 10m tall.

Easter Island is a Unesco World Heritage-listed island and lies some 3,500km (2,170 miles) off the coast of Chile. It is the most remote inhabited island on the planet.

Chile’s undersecretary of cultural heritage said that officials from the country’s National Monuments Council (CNM) “are on the ground assessing the damages” from the fire on the island’s sacred stone figures.