Tourists will soon be allowed to travel to Easter Island in the Pacific again after more than two years of the Corona pandemic. The borders of the popular volcanic island will be reopened to foreign visitors from 1 August, the Chilean government announced on Friday.

Easter Island, located 3500 kilometres west of the Chilean coast, is famous for its monumental statues, the so-called Moai. The borders to the remote island had been closed after the first proven cases of corona occurred in Chile in March 2020. Until then, tourism was the most important source of income for the island with its approximately 10,000 inhabitants.

On Easter Island itself, only isolated cases of Covid-19 have been registered in the past two years. According to the local authorities, there have been no deaths from Covid-19 on the island, nor has anyone had to go to hospital. The clinic in the main town of Hanga Roa does not have an intensive care unit, but it does have ventilators. Emergency flights from Easter Island to the mainland take about five and a half hours.

In October, the indigenous population of Easter Island had voted on the reopening of the island in a non-binding referendum. At the time, 67 per cent of the voters voted against the opening step.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 3.6 million cases of infection with the coronavirus have been registered in Chile since the beginning of the pandemic, and more than 57,000 people have died in connection with Covid-19. On Easter Island, the vaccination rate is around 73 percent.