The sign, which is addressed to dogs on the doors of butchers and supermarkets with the note “We have to stay outside”, could soon be found by vacationers at the port entrance and the airport terminal of Hanga Roa, clearly addressed to them.

We, the residents of Easter Island decided on Sunday, do not want any strangers with us.

That sounds harsher than it is.

Because immediately after the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the island was sealed off from the rest of the world.

Now 67 percent of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people, voted in a referendum not to change anything about this situation for the time being.

The reason is the fear of bringing the virus to the island. Only eight corona cases were known there, the last in September of last year. Nobody died from the infection. And that's how it should stay. The fact that there is no inhabited place in the whole world that is further away from the rest of civilization, which made the island a kind of natural isolation station for a long time, was of no use to the inhabitants in the end. European explorers brought in flu and syphilis in the 18th century, which killed a large part of the population. Smallpox was added in the 19th century. And at the beginning of the 20th century, leprosy spread. The number of residents had shrunk from around three thousand at the time of the first European visitors to barely more than a hundred. That kind of thing leaves its mark.

Today almost ten thousand people live on Easter Island, most of whom have moved here since the construction of an airport in the 1980s. The main source of income is tourism. And so the real question behind the referendum was how to envision the future. They had already been thoroughly built on Easter Island, when all thinking and acting were concentrated on creating the moais, puzzling colossi made of stone up to twenty meters high. This was accompanied by an unparalleled overexploitation of nature. Ten million palm trees were felled. Paradise turned into a steppe. Meager yields in agriculture and fishing led to famine. No island, James Cook noted in his log, offers fewer refreshments and amenities.From now on, not receiving any more visitors would not necessarily lead back to exactly this situation. Agriculture today, it is said, is mature enough to feed a few thousand people. So would it be worth experimenting with living apart from the rest of the world again? Then Easter Island could become something like a colony in the vastness of space. Visited only now and then: by researchers in spacesuits.