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Republic of Naoero (formerly Nauru)
Capital: Yaren – Naoero is the only country in the world with no official capital in law.
Population: 12,000+
Language: Nauruan, English
1 – Topside
Topside is the raised limestone plateau that covers the interior of Naoero, formerly Nauru, and it held one of the richest phosphate deposits on Earth, recognised in 1899 when Albert Ellis identified a rock from the island, used as a doorstop in a Sydney company office and taken for petrified wood, as high-grade phosphate.
Mining on Topside began in 1906–07 and ran for most of a century, stripping about four-fifths of Naoero down to a field of jagged limestone pinnacles, while the phosphate was shipped from the cantilever loaders at Aiwo, which the German raider Komet shelled on 27 December 1940.
Phosphate income made the islanders of Naoero among the richest people in the world in the 1970s, and part of it went into Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, backed with about £2 million of government money, which opened in London’s West End on 3 June 1993 and closed on 10 July.
2 – Command Ridge
Command Ridge, the highest point of Naoero at about 65–70 m, rises above Aiwo and served as the Japanese command and communications post after Japanese forces landed unopposed on 26 August 1942, completing an airstrip on the island in January 1943.
Rusted anti-aircraft guns sit among the scrub on Command Ridge beside the concrete communications bunker, and in March 1943, the Japanese executed the Australian administrator, Frederick Chalmers, with four other Australians, while in July they killed 39 leprosy patients, towed out to sea in a boat and fired on.
In 1943, the Japanese deported about 1,200 islanders from Naoero to forced labour on Truk, where about 460 died, and Angam Day, on 26 October, marks the population reaching 1,500, the number long held as the minimum for the people’s survival, first in 1932 and again in 1949 after the war.
3 – Yaren
Yaren, the district on Naoero’s south coast, has been the seat of government since the country, the world’s third-smallest by area, gained independence on 31 January 1968, and its older name, Moqua, comes from Moqua Well, an underground freshwater lake.
Yaren’s Parliament House and government offices stand near the island’s airport, the Moqua Caves lie close by, and a ring road of roughly 19 km circles the whole of Naoero.
Naoero has no official capital, as nothing in its constitution names one, so Yaren, simply the district where the government offices are, appears on maps and in almanacs as a capital city that technically isn’t.