You’d think every country would have its own capital city, right? Some countries even have two (Bolivia’s parliament meets in La Paz, but its Supreme Court meets in Sucre) or three (South Africa divides its three branches of government between Pretoria, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein.) Sure, there are some tiny countries where the nation itself is its own capital, like Vatican City or Monaco or Singapore. But how could you get by without a capital city at all? Let’s ask the residents of the tiny Pacific republic of Nauru.
**Zoom in to see just how tiny the island really is! **
You’d be forgiven for not knowing much about Nauru—including that it even exists. The world’s smallest republic, Nauru has an area smaller than any nation except for Vatican City and Monaco, and its population (9,400 or so) is the world’s second-lowest after the Vatican. It’s so obscure that its national flag is literally a map showing people how to find it: a gold horizontal line represents the Equator, with a white star right below it, where Nauru lies.
Some sources call “Yaren” the capital of Nauru, but that’s not true. In fact, the island has no official capital city, and in fact it doesn’t really have any cities at all. The Yaren District is just an area on the island’s southern shore where most of its important buildings are located. That’s where you’ll find Parliament House, the embassies of the only two nations that have an ambassador to Nauru (Taiwan and Australia), and the Nauru International Airport. Nauru is so small that its airport runway stretches almost all the way across the island, and its official airline used to land its only jet there until 2005, when the plane was repossessed by Australian creditors.
That kind of thing sums up Nauru’s recent history pretty well, unfortunately. At the time of its 1968 independence, Nauru was the richest country on earth, due to valuable deposits of phosphates formed from centuries of bird guano. But the economy collapsed when the bird-poop ran out. Today the unemployment rate sits at 90 percent, and so does the obesity rate, due to unhealthy Western foods that became popular during the boom years.
Things have gotten so bad there that Nauru has resorted to importing prisoners to stave off bankruptcy. It’s become a sort of Southern Hemisphere version of Guantanamo, accepting many of Australia’s overseas asylum-seekers in exchange for foreign aid. The detention center is located in the Meneng District east of Yaren. (Meneng, by the way, is also the site of Nauru’s presidential residence, burned down by an angry mob in 2001.) If the prison keeps growing faster than the rest of the country, maybe Meneng will be Nauru’s unofficial capital someday.
