Nauru
The world's smallest island republic
Nauru is the smallest island nation and the smallest republic in the world, a single raised coral island of just 21 square kilometers in the central Pacific. For much of the twentieth century it was also one of the wealthiest places on Earth per capita, made rich by vast deposits of phosphate laid down over millennia of seabird droppings. The mining of that phosphate stripped most of the interior to barren pinnacles and, when the deposits ran low, left the country economically stranded. Nauru has no official capital, and government offices sit in the district of Yaren.
The island is a raised coral atoll, ringed by a narrow fertile coastal belt where almost everyone lives, surrounding a central limestone plateau known as Topside that decades of phosphate mining reduced to a jagged, largely uninhabitable moonscape. The highest point, Command Ridge, reaches only 65 meters. There are no rivers, and fresh water is scarce. The climate is hot and humid tropical, subject to drought, and the island is fringed by a coral reef that drops steeply into the deep surrounding ocean.
Micronesian and Polynesian peoples settled Nauru long before European contact. Annexed by Germany, later administered by Australia, and occupied by Japan in the Second World War, the island became independent in 1968. Phosphate wealth funded extravagant spending that mostly evaporated as the resource was exhausted and trust funds were mismanaged. In recent decades Nauru has relied on hosting an Australian offshore immigration detention center and on fishing revenue, while confronting the long-term damage left by a century of mining.