Category: Nauru

Nauru is the world’s smallest independent island nation (and the third smallest of all sovereign nations). It’s located in an isolated spot close to the equator in the south-west Pacific far from any other islands. I first heard about Nauru as a teenager in school and was fascinated by its extreme rags-to-riches-and-back story. Back then in the late 1970s Nauru was still one of the richest nations on Earth, thanks to the mining of high-grade phosphate deposits on its central plateau. But even back then it was clear that the deposits would be depleted before too long. Indeed from the late 1980s/early 1990s mining declined to a mere