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Trip ideas  /  5 days on Easter Island  /  Ahu Tongariki
Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island, Rapa Nui
Historic site · Easter Island, Rapa Nui

Ahu Tongariki

Fifteen moai.A tsunami in 1960.Restored in the 1990s.The winter solstice sunset.

Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The largest

Ahu Tongariki is the largest ahu on Easter Island

Ahu Tongariki is the largest ahu on Easter Island. It has fifteen moai, including one that weighs eighty-six tonnes, the heaviest ever erected on the island. All the moai here face sunset during the winter solstice.

Fifteenmoai stand on the restored ahu

The capital

The ahu was the capital of the Hotu-iti clan, and its moai were toppled

Ahu Tongariki was the main centre and capital of the Hotu-iti clan, the eastern confederation of the Rapa Nui people. Its moai were toppled during the island's civil wars.

The tsunami

In 1960 a tsunami swept the whole ahu inland

In 1960 a tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile swept the ahu inland. The site lies one kilometer from Rano Raraku and Poike, in the Hotu-iti area of Rapa Nui National Park.

Restored

A five-year project restored the ahu in the 1990s

Ahu Tongariki was substantially restored in the 1990s by a multidisciplinary team headed by the archaeologists Claudio Cristino and Patricia Vargas Casanova. The project was run under an agreement among the Chilean government, the University of Chile and the crane manufacturer Tadano.

Day 2, morning

Next is Rano Raraku.

More stories from this trip idea

The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Ahu Tongariki and the Wikipedia article Moai, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.

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