Chile’s National Museum of Natural History on Monday said that it would return to Easter Island an enormous stone statue taken from the Rapa Nui and brought to the mainland 150 years ago.
The monolith is one of hundreds, called Moai, carved by the Rapa Nui in honor of their ancestors and sometimes referred to as the Easter Island heads.
The statues are today the island’s greatest tourist attraction, sculpted from basalt more than 1,000 years ago.
The one being returned, dubbed Moai Tau, is a 715kg giant brought by the Chilean navy about 3,700km across the Pacific in 1870.
Eight years