Yaren

Yaren is the capital-that-isn't of the smallest republic on Earth: Nauru, twenty-one square kilometers of uplifted coral, has no official capital at all, so its parliament, airstrip and government simply share this district by the runway. One road rings the entire nation in nineteen kilometers — walked sociably at dusk by a meaningful share of the population — and the plane taxis past the parliament's windows, which residents treat as the world's most reasonable commute.

The island's story is the atlas's most honest parable, and the Guide tells it true: Nauru's interior — Topside — held some of the planet's richest phosphate, and for a few decades the republic was, per capita, among the wealthiest nations anywhere; the ground itself was sold, shipload by shipload, until the money thinned and the center of the island remained as a moonscape of grey coral pinnacles. Nauru carries the lesson without self-pity, and replanting trials now green the edges of the scar.

The traveller who comes — and almost none do, which is its own draw — walks or cycles the ring at dawn, swims Anibare's boat-channel, visits Buada's green inland lagoon, climbs Command Ridge past the war's rusted guns, and watches the frigatebird keepers call their hand-raised birds down from the trade winds, an art kept nowhere else quite like this. Flights are few, lodging simple, cash advisable; the welcome, in the world's least-visited republic, is proportionally large.