Three hundred forty islands make one of Earth’s smallest republics
Palau packs about 340 western Caroline Islands into 466 square kilometres, making it the world’s sixteenth-smallest country. Ngerulmud on Babeldaob is the capital, while Koror remains the most populous island and city. The republic has no army of its own and relies on the United States for defence under free association.
Estimates of first settlement run from the third or second millennium BCE to about 1000 BCE, by Austronesian voyagers most likely from today’s Philippines or Indonesia. Europeans first glimpsed Sonsorol in 1521 from the Trinidad, flagship of Magellan’s expedition. Paul Klein mapped the group after 1696 Samar shipwrecks explained pebble charts; Spanish, German, and Japanese rulers followed, with Japan’s South Seas Mandate after World War I.
Letters by Klein and, in 1705, Andrés Serrano stirred European curiosity, though three Jesuit voyages from the Philippines failed to arrive. British traders came regularly in the eighteenth century, and after the East India Company’s Antelope wrecked off Ulong in 1783, Prince Lee Boo travelled to London. Spain sold the islands to Germany in 1899, and Japan seized them in 1914. The 1944 Battle of Peleliu killed more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese before U. S. trusteeship and eventual independence in association.
When four other trust districts formed the Federated States of Micronesia in 1979, Palau voted against joining and chose a separate path. Belau may derive from beluu (“village”) or a creation-myth phrase; Spanish Los Palaos yielded English Palau. Tourism, subsistence farming, and fishing carry an economy under a presidential republic with a bicameral congress while Washington covers defense.
Conservation has become a calling card: Palau launched the Micronesia Challenge in 2005 to protect 30 percent of near-shore waters and 20 percent of forests by 2020, created the world’s first shark sanctuary in 2009, and in 2015 became the first country to protect 80 percent of its waters.
Source: Palau
