The world's smallest island republic
Nauru is a single oval island in the central Pacific and the smallest republic in the world. A road of about nineteen kilometres circles the island along the coast, past Anibare Bay, the island's most attractive beach, and the calm Buada Lagoon inland. The high central plateau, known as Topside, was stripped by more than a century of phosphate mining, leaving a strange landscape of coral pinnacles. Second World War Japanese guns and bunkers survive at Command Ridge, the highest point on the island.