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Piramides de Güímar
Rapa Nui, the unsolved mysteries
Few islands have fascinated so many people and for so long as Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as is known by the indigenous population, the island considered to be the most isolated on earth, part of Polynesia, a dot in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and New Zealand.


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31.01.2012 - Easter Island was first discovered by Europeans in 1722 but had been settled long before, and already humans had struggled to find an equitable balance between their environment and their needs, to the detriment of the island’s natural resources.  By the time those first European explorers landed the huge megaliths, the enormous stone statues known as moai, dotted the small island’s landscape.  To this day how they were built, how they were transported and how they were erected in the day are unsolved mysteries.
However there are theories, and many of them are explored in a new permanent exhibition at the Parque Ethnográfico Pirámides de Güímar, founded when Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl oversaw the reconstruction of local pyramids and models of boats he used during his lifetime to prove the existence of pre-industrial revolution intercontinental sea travel.  Now the park also houses this visual exhibition of the wonders of Easter island, documenting the struggles of the indigenous races with the forces of nature and the forces of European settlers, who brought Christianity, disease, slavery, and weapons, and saw the reduction of the numbers of the local population to just 111 in 1877.  However according to historians, long before European settlers arrived, internal struggles and social upheavals had seen much of the island’s forests destroyed and through some combination of overharvesting/overhunting, rat predation, and climate change, the island was largely deforested, and it did not have any trees more than 10 feet tall. Loss of large trees meant that residents were no longer able to build seaworthy vessels, significantly diminishing their fishing abilities. This was further exacerbated by the loss of land birds and the collapse in seabird populations. By the 18th century, residents of the island were largely sustained by farming, with domestic chickens as the primary source of protein.  An early example of extreme survival and in fact the name of the exhibition is Rapa Nui: Polinesia: Supervivencia Extrema.
Present at the opening of the new exhibition were Fred Olsen, Tenerife Cabildo president Ricardo Melchior, local politicians and scientists the deputy mayor of Easter Island Ingrid Yuriko Westermeier Tuki and Sonia Haoa, a highly qualified archeologist from the island who took guests on an informative tour of the exhibition after the speeches.



Gallery: Rapa Nui, the unsolved mysteries
 
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