---
type: Country
title: Nauru
description: Once the richest country per capita on earth, now 80% stripped bare — a 21 km² island you can circle in half an hour, with a car graveyard, a derelict phosphate works and an Australian detention camp that is still open.
tags: [nauru, pacific, phosphate, mining, refugees, obesity, colonial-history, world-war-two]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Nauru

A tiny remote island in the Pacific, one of the least visited countries on earth,
and — Harry's framing — the wildest rise-and-fall story you've never heard.

He and [Kieran](/people/kieran.md) rent bikes and ride a full loop of it in a
day, which he notes is the first time in his life he has been round an entire
country in one go.

*Obs: Nauru has no separate place page. The country is 21 km² and Harry circles
all of it; every site below — the detention camp, the phosphate works, the
bunkers, the car graveyard — sits on the one ring road, and a place page would
duplicate this one entirely.*

*Obs: journalists are effectively barred — Harry says they must pay $10,000 or
risk arrest — so he entered as a tourist. The video also carries an eSIM sponsor
tied to a charity donation.*

## The basics

- **21 km², population around 10,000.** The third smallest country in the world
  after Monaco and Vatican City.
- **Called Pleasant Island** by the colonisers who arrived first.
- **One ring road**, the only good road, which loops the island in 20 to 30
  minutes by car.
- **Bikes cost $30 a day** for two.
- **The airport is tiny** — the smallest international airport Harry has seen —
  with a single fence, and **you have to give way to landing aircraft** on the
  road beside it, or the thrust will kill you.

## The rise and the fall

- **Phosphate** — a fertiliser mineral, and on Nauru the accumulated product of
  seabirds — was found in abundance and heavily mined from the 1970s.
- **It made Nauru the richest nation per capita on the planet.** The average
  Nauruan earned **four times more than the average American.**
- **The English discovered and worked it**, and Harry's account is that much of
  the wealth had already been funnelled elsewhere by the time independence came.
- **80% of the island is now stripped bare** — land that is not arable, not
  habitable and, in his word, worthless. Only a narrow coastal strip can be lived
  on.
- **The works are derelict.** By the end they were mining deeper and harder for
  less, spending hundreds of thousands to find phosphate and barely turning a
  profit.
- **There is no port.** Jagged coral rock rings the whole island, so ships can't
  come in; phosphate was loaded by cantilever booms reaching out to vessels
  offshore. The booms are still standing.

**What it left behind:**

- **Extreme poverty and no fresh water.**
- **Life expectancy of 64.**
- **A car graveyard** of imported 1970s and 80s cars left to rot because they
  can't be run and there is no recycling. During the boom, the head police
  commissioner imported a yellow Lamborghini and turned out to be too large to
  fit in it.

## Health

- **The highest obesity rate in the world**, and **the highest rate of smoking
  addiction.**
- **The obesity figure is given twice in the video and doesn't agree with
  itself** — 90% in the opening and 70% later
  *(from video – unverified)*.
- **Nearly 50% of the population has type 2 diabetes.**
- The cause, as Harry sets it out: almost no local food production, so the diet
  runs on imported processed food high in sugar and fat, alongside a sedentary
  way of life.

**Everything is imported and priced accordingly** — in the supermarket he films
a watermelon at $24 and grapes at $21.

## How the country now makes money

- **Housing Australia's refugees.** Australia pays, on Harry's figure, **A$500,000
  per detainee** to hold people offshore.
- **Deep-sea mining**, the current strategy: polymetallic nodules from the seabed
  for electric-car batteries. Harry's note on the irony is the sharpest thing in
  the video — Nauru would be powering the green transition while risking
  catastrophic damage to marine ecosystems, and we know more about the surface of
  the moon than the bottom of the sea.
- **Historically**: offshore banking and money laundering — including, he says,
  for terrorists — selling passports, and switching diplomatic recognition
  between China and Taiwan for cash, twice.
- **Some solar**, which he points out as the one thing that isn't doom and gloom.

His summary: a country that has repeatedly sold itself to the highest bidder, and
short-term gain chosen over long-term sustainability every time.

## The detention camp

Harry expected it to be closed. It is not.

- **Still open and functioning**, and a restricted area that only approved
  personnel may enter. He tries two routes in and gets nowhere.
- **It is full**, so refugees are also housed in hotels on the island.
- **Reports of inhumane conditions, riots and deaths** have made Nauru a symbol of
  failed migration policy.

**What one detainee told him**, recorded here without any identifying detail
beyond the country he fled:

- **A year in so far** — six months inside the camp and six outside — and he has
  been told the wait can run to **10, 15 or 20 years.**
- **He is not allowed to work**, and eats once or twice a day because the money
  doesn't stretch. A biryani on the island costs $20.
- **He came by boat from Indonesia**, a month inside with no view of the outside,
  intending to reach Australia.
- **He paid $13,000 to traffickers.** He knew it was dangerous and went anyway,
  because the alternative was worse.
- **He says another boat capsized** and many people died.
- **He cannot go home**, because he says he would be killed there.
- **He has a heart condition** and says he is given check-ups but not medicine.
- **Asked what he wants**: not a personal dream, he says — everyone's dream. To
  go to another country, and to be free.

**Harry's reading of who benefits**: he is told Nauru profits around $1 million a
year from the arrangement, and concludes that both governments gain — Australia
removes people it doesn't want, Nauru gets income, and the longer people stay the
more Nauru earns.

## The war

- **Japan invaded in 1942**, built bunkers, tunnels and hidden dens — several
  still stand on the north of the island — and forced Nauruans into labour.
- **The Allies cut the supply lines**, and the island was starved.
- **Australia liberated it** and found it broken. Harry marks this as the point
  where things turned, and says these reminders matter because history repeats.

## Harry's verdict

Genuinely conflicted, and he says so rather than resolving it. He arrived with
negative preconceptions and negative research, and found a lot of the negatives
confirmed — while insisting that the Nauruan people were friendly and parts of
the island are beautiful.

The blame he assigns is specific: the Nauruan government, the Australian
government, and the leaders — **not the people of Nauru.** He would like it to
serve as a lesson in managing natural resources, and says plainly that he doesn't
expect it to.

## Source

- [Visiting the World's Fattest Country That Went Bankrupt 🇳🇷](/videos/w54zVjkm5-Q.md) —
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w54zVjkm5-Q