Yaren is the de facto capital of Nauru. It is a district of 1.5 square kilometres on the southern coast of the island, and the 2021 census counted 803 people living there, out of a national population of 12,511. Nauru has never named an official capital and has no cities at all, so Yaren holds the role because Parliament House, the main government offices and the country's only airport all stand inside its boundaries. The ground itself explains much of what Yaren is: a thin, flat strip of coral sand squeezed between a fringing reef and a mined-out limestone plateau, with most of its level land taken up by a single runway.
A Strip of Sand Between the Reef and Topside
Nauru is an oval island of about 21 square kilometres, just south of the equator in the central Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba, part of Kiribati, about 300 kilometres to the east. Picture the island as two rings. The outer ring is a fertile coastal belt only 150 to 300 metres wide, running right round the shore. Inside it, coral cliffs climb to a central plateau that Nauruans call Topside, which reaches 71 metres at Command Ridge, the highest point in the country.
Yaren sits on the outer ring. Its official elevation is 25 metres, and the district is bordered by Boe to the west, Meneng to the east and Buada to the north. Buada is the only district without a coastline, and it holds Buada Lagoon, a slightly brackish lake of 3.8 hectares in a sunken hollow of the plateau. Seen from the air, Yaren is a band of houses, government buildings and palms wedged between the Pacific and the green-and-grey scar of Topside. The long pale runway fills most of the flat ground in between.
The coast is where the island's people have always lived. The island originally had 169 villages, and by 1900 many of them were already abandoned or destroyed. As the population grew, the surviving villages merged into one continuous settlement that now runs all the way round the island, and Yaren is one stretch of that ring rather than a town with edges. You can drive from Yaren into Meneng or Boe without noticing a change. Yaren is one of fourteen administrative districts, and all of them except Buada touch the sea.
The reef matters just as much as the land. A fringing coral reef surrounds Nauru. It is exposed at low tide and dotted with coral pinnacles, and it has always kept the island from having a deep-water port. Small boats can get through channels in the reef, and for most of the 20th century phosphate was loaded onto ships through a shiploading cantilever rather than at a harbour wall. Getting people and goods to Yaren has therefore always been harder than it looks on a map. That is a big part of why the airfield became so important.
Moqua Well, the Lake Beneath Makwa
Nauru has no rivers or streams. Fresh water comes from rain caught on roofs or, in the past, from ships that carried it as ballast on their way back to load phosphate. Rain also soaks straight into the porous coral rock, and under Yaren it has collected in one of the island's very few natural bodies of fresh water. Moqua Well is a small underground lake beneath the district, close to the Moqua Caves, a set of caverns below Yaren.
The well is so central to local history that it gave the district its old name. Before independence Yaren was known as Makwa or Moqua, a name taken from the well. During the Second World War the well was the main source of drinking water for the islanders, which is why a lake is called a well. In 2001, after an alcohol-related drowning, the authorities fenced it off. The well is still one of the few places on Nauru that visitors go looking for, and it is a reminder that the government district was built over the island's most dependable water.
Rainfall on Nauru is anything but dependable. Monsoon rains fall between November and February, but annual totals swing widely with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and the island has gone through several serious droughts. Temperatures hardly move. Daytime highs run between 30 and 35 °C and nights stay close to 25 °C all year, and Yaren has a hot, humid tropical rainforest climate (Köppen Af).
Parliament House and the 1943 Runway
Much of the flat land in Yaren is taken up by Nauru International Airport, which the Japanese built. Japanese troops occupied Nauru on 25 August 1942 and used forced labour to lay down the airstrip, and operations began in January 1943. Allied aircraft first bombed the island's airfields on 25 March 1943, and the bombing cut off food supplies that had been flown in. The occupation was brutal for Nauruans. The Japanese deported 1,200 of them to Chuuk to work as labourers, and only 745 survived to be brought home on the ship Trienza in January 1946. Japanese guns from the war can still be found in Yaren.
After the war the airstrip became a civilian airport, and the modern state grew up around it. Parliament House, the police station, a secondary school and the main administration offices are all clustered just beside the runway. The airport also houses the head office of Nauru Airlines, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Directorate of Immigration and the Customs Service. Yaren also holds the fire station, the satellite earth station and the Australian High Commission. Taiwan used to have an embassy here too, until Nauru switched its recognition to the People's Republic of China on 15 January 2024. Nearly everything the Nauruan state does happens within a few hundred metres of the runway.
Parliament itself dates from independence on 31 January 1968. It replaced the Legislative Council created under Australia's Nauru Act 1965, which had nine elected members among its fifteen. Today the chamber has 19 members. The number went up from 18 at the 2013 election after a deadlock in 2010, when the House split evenly into nine government and nine opposition members. Yaren is also a constituency in its own right and elects two of the 19 MPs. Members of Parliament choose the president, so the building in Yaren is where Nauru's governments are made and brought down.
Education is clustered here too. Yaren Primary School teaches Years 1 to 3, and Nauru Secondary School, for Years 10 to 12, is in the district. The Nauru Learning Village in Yaren holds the University of the South Pacific's Nauru Campus and the national technical and vocational training centre. The Naoero Museum, the national museum, formally opened in Yaren on 30 January 2019. Its collection covers the Second World War, radio, policing and a photographic archive. Much of Nauru's material culture is still held abroad, in places such as the British Museum and Te Papa in Wellington.
Phosphate, Topside and a District With No Official Status
Yaren's strange shape as a capital comes from what happened up on the plateau behind it. In 1900 the prospector Albert Fuller Ellis found phosphate on Nauru. The Pacific Phosphate Company began mining in 1906 under an agreement with Germany, which had annexed the island in 1888, and shipped its first cargo in 1907. After Australian troops took the island in 1914, the Nauru Island Agreement of 1919 handed the deposits to the British Phosphate Commission, run jointly by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
A century of strip-mining stripped and devastated about 80 per cent of Nauru's land area. It left a barren field of jagged limestone pinnacles up to 15 metres high and made most of the interior uninhabitable. In 1964, when the island was expected to become unliveable by the 1990s, Australia even proposed moving the whole population to Curtis Island off Queensland. The result is that everyone lives on the coastal ring, and the government settled on the stretch of it with an airfield rather than on any planned site. Nauru's viable phosphate ran out in the 1990s. The Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, which was meant to support Nauruans afterwards, is estimated to have fallen from A$1.3 billion in 1991 to A$138 million in 2002. The National Bank of Nauru failed in 2006.
Strictly speaking, Yaren is not a capital at all. The district was created in 1968, and the republic has no cities and no designated capital. The United Nations accepts Yaren as the country's "main district". Atlases and reference works list it as the capital, occasionally naming Aiwo on the west coast instead, because the institutions of state are in Yaren. English and Nauruan, the two official languages, are both spoken in the district. In May 2026 a constitutional amendment changed the country's official English name to the Republic of Naoero, and that change was formally notified to the United Nations in June 2026. The capital question was left untouched.
Sea Walls on Yaren's Shore
Yaren's low shore was the right place for a runway, but that position is now a weakness. The airport runs along the coast, and one end of it meets the ocean at a sea wall that takes the full force of Pacific swells. Parliament, the police headquarters and the schools are all on the same narrow belt of land between the runway and the reef. Australia's foreign ministry photographed that wall in 2013 to show how exposed it is as sea levels rise.
The plateau is Nauru's only high ground, but mining has turned much of it into pinnacle karst that cannot easily be built on or farmed. In 1989 Nauru took Australia to the International Court of Justice over the mining damage, in Certain Phosphate Lands: Nauru v. Australia, and the case was settled out of court with money for rehabilitating the mined-out land. In March 2025 the government announced a citizenship-by-investment scheme, starting at $105,000, to pay for moving 90 per cent of the population to a new community on higher ground. If that plan goes ahead, the government district may one day move inland from the sand strip it has occupied since 1968. For now, arriving in Yaren still means landing on a wartime runway a few steps from Parliament House, with the reef on one side and the cliffs of Topside on the other.
Yaren makes the most sense alongside the country around it. The Nauru country guide covers the island's clans, language and economy, and Nauru's place near the top of the smallest countries by area shows how little room its capital had to begin with. The nearest comparable Pacific capital is South Tarawa in Kiribati, another government strung along a thin strip of coral.
Quick Facts About Yaren
- Country: Nauru
- Continent: Oceania
- Country population: approximately 12 thousand
- Capital city status: Yaren is the capital of Nauru, the seat of national government, and the location of foreign embassies, parliament, and the head of state's official residence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the capital of Nauru?
The capital of Nauru is Yaren. Yaren is the seat of national government, hosts most foreign embassies and consulates, and is typically where the head of state and parliament are located.
What continent is Yaren in?
Yaren, the capital of Nauru, is located in Oceania. As Nauru's capital, Yaren serves as the country's primary connection to the broader Oceanian political, economic, and cultural sphere.
Why is Yaren the capital of Nauru?
Yaren was chosen as the capital of Nauru for reasons that typically combine geography, history, and politics. Capital city selections often reflect a desire for centrality (being accessible from across the country), historical importance (being a longstanding seat of government or culture), or neutrality (being acceptable to multiple regions or ethnic groups within the country). The specific reasons for Yaren's designation are detailed in the city's history above.
What is Yaren known for?
As the capital of Nauru, Yaren is best known for housing the country's central government institutions — parliament, presidential or royal residences, supreme court, and key ministries. It is also typically a major cultural and economic center within Nauru, hosting national museums, embassies, and signature monuments. The introduction and history sections above provide detailed coverage of the city's specific notable institutions and landmarks.
Related Pages
- Nauru Country Guide — full geography, climate, economy, and culture overview
- Flag of Nauru — meaning, history, and design of Nauru's national flag