Easter Island statue (sculpture) made in Indonesia.

Easter Island (Spanish: Isla de Pascua; Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui) is a Polynesian island in the Pacific Ocean. Politically, it is a province of Chile within the Valparaíso region. The Chilean governor of the island is Melania Carolina Hotu Hey. The capital of Easter Island is Hanga Roa. The island is especially known for the hundreds of Moai (Easter Island statues) that can be found there. The island, with 163.6 square kilometers, is approximately the same size as the Dutch Wadden Island Texel (170 km2). There are 5,761 people living there (2012). It is one of the most isolated islands in the world; the nearest inhabited island, Pitcairn, is 2075 km away. The name Easter Island ("Paasch-Eyland") was given by Jacob Roggeveen, who arrived at the island with three ships on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. Rapa Nui literally means the Great Rock in Polynesian (rapa: rock, nui: great). The island has been called that by sailors from Tahiti since around 1863. The designation is now used by the inhabitants for both the island itself, their language, and to refer to their own people (Rapa Nui). Another indigenous name for the island is 'Mata ki te rani' or 'Eyes that look to the sky' (mata: eyes, ki: that, te: look, rani: sky). This name refers to the ancestor figures, or moai, with the remarkable eye sockets that are indeed tilted towards the sky. Another name that the original inhabitants gave to their island was Te pito o te henua, which means 'The navel of the world.' According to some legends, the island's original name would have been 'Te pito o te kainga a Hau Maka,' which means 'The small piece of land of Hau Maka.'