The beautiful tiny island with white-sand beaches that only 200 people visit every year

Nauru

Nauru is a small island state in the Pacific (Image: Getty)

A tiny island circled by a coral reef gets hardly any , and you’ve likely never heard of it.

Nauru is a 13-mile island microstate in the with a population of just 10,000 people, formerly known as Pleasant Island.

The third smallest country in the world is close to the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

Only 200 people the island annually. This means only 15,000 people have visited in the last 75 years, less than 10 percent of the number of people who visit London daily.

Part of this very small club is the late , who visited the tiny state in 1982 as part of her tour of the South Pacific.

Nauru

Nauru sees only 200 visitors annually (Image: Getty)

Nauru is circled by a coral reef, making it popular among divers and snorkellers, and has white-sand beaches lined with palm trees to relax on. Further inland is lush jungle.

Among the top sites to visit are Buada Lagoon – a freshwater lagoon at the centre of the island known for its unique fish and birds, Command Ridge  – the tallest point on the island, the Nauru Phosphate Corporation – old mines which can be toured, and the Second World War relics.

And it stays warm throughout the year with an average high remaining around 32C and an average low of around 26C. The rainy season is from November to February. 

Settled on over 3,000 years ago, Nauru was claimed as a German colony in the late 1800s, made a League of Nations mandate after the First World War, and occupied by Japanese troops in the Second World War before finally gaining its independence in 1968.

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It is a phosphate rock island and the rich deposits made it one of the world’s richest countries in the 1960s with the highest GDP per capita in the world. But mining exhausted the deposits in the 1990s.

The state also has no army, one of 36 countries in the world without one. Australia is responsible for protecting Nauru, though the island does have a police force.

Visitors can only get to Nauru by air with flights from Australia and Fiji. Flights can be infrequent and expensive. There are a handful of small hotels and guesthouses on the island.

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