Orongo village

We were in with 30 min to closing when we met 2 more guards that told us they were closing in 15 min. We told them we were informed that we had 30 min and we will stay till 5:30 pm. They didn't say anything further, in fact, one of them joined us and gave us a guided tour 😁😁
Orongo is a stone village and ceremonial centre at the southwestern tip of Rapa Nui(Easter Island). It consists of a collection of low, sod-covered, windowless, round-walled buildings with even lower doors positioned on the high south-westerly tip of the large volcanic caldera called Rano Kau. Below Orongo on one side a 300-meter barren cliff face drops down to the ocean; on the other, a more-gentle but still very steep grassy slope leads down to a freshwater marsh inside the high caldera.
In the 1860s, most of the Rapa Nui islanders died of disease or were enslaved, and when the survivors were converted to Christianity, Orongo fell into disuse. In 1868, the crew of HMS Topaze removed the huge basalt moaiknown as Hoa Hakananai'a from Orongo. It is now housed in the British Museum.

There's even a stone in the shape of a bowl where women from that time used to have child birth hoping they would grow to be birdmen. There's even a petroglyph of a baby on the stone.Leggi altro