Nauru

Nauru is a curiosity like almost nowhere else: an eight-square-mile coral island in the central Pacific, and one of the least-visited countries on Earth. There are no crowds here because there is no tourism machine, only a warm island community and a place utterly its own.

The story is written into the land. Decades of phosphate mining left a dramatic interior of jagged limestone pinnacles, now the focus of gradual ecosystem restoration, while the coast keeps its fringing reef, quiet lagoons and Buada Lagoon inland.

This is a destination for the true collector of places, the traveller drawn to the remote, the unusual and the genuinely uncrowded. Come for reef fishing, rusting wartime relics and the rare feeling of being somewhere hardly anyone goes.