49 Fun Facts About Palau

Which American reality show filmed two of its seasons in Palau, first aired in 2005 and 2008?

Survivor. In Survivor: Palau, its tenth season, the Ulong tribe failed to win a single immunity challenge and shrank until one member was left, who then had to join her rivals.

Palau forms the western part of which larger archipelago?

Caroline Islands. Spanish explorers named the chain in the 17th century; when its other districts united as one federation in the 1970s, Palauans voted to stay out and go it alone.

Which purpose-built site became Palau's seat of government in October 2006?

Ngerulmud. The name means 'place of fermented angelfish': women once gathered on the hill there to offer the fermented fish to the gods.

Palau's capital holds what unusual distinction among the world's sovereign capitals?

Least populous. The constitution ordered a permanent capital on the largest island, so the government sits in a purpose-built complex with almost nobody living around it.

Palau's Blue Corner is one of the country's best-known sites for which activity?

Scuba diving. Tourism is Palau's main industry and the reefs are the draw; since 2020, four-fifths of the country's waters have been closed to all commercial fishing.

Palau's 340 or so islands add up to about the same land area as which European microstate?

Andorra. Each covers a little under 500 square kilometres, yet Palau's islands are scattered across about 600,000 square kilometres of sea that it also has to police.

Giant stone discs quarried in Palau were shipped about 400 kilometres by sea to serve as money on which island?

Yap. Its sailors carved the discs from cave rock in Palau and ferried them home, and the hardship of each voyage became part of a stone's value.

In 1696, stranded islanders showed a missionary the layout of Palau and its neighbours using what?

Pebbles. They laid them out to stand for their home islands, and the Jesuit Paul Klein drew a map from the pattern, which inspired three failed mission voyages before one reached Palau in 1710.

Prince Lee Boo, son of a ruler in Palau, was taken to London in 1784 and died there within months of what?

Smallpox. He had sailed to learn about Europe, lived with the captain's family and went to school in London, but caught the disease about five months after landing.

Which company's ship Antelope was wrecked off Palau in 1783?

British East India Company. Stranded for three months, the crew built a new boat from the wreckage with the islanders' help, and the local ruler's son Lee Boo sailed away with them.

After the Spanish-American War, Spain sold Palau in 1899 to which country?

Germany. It ruled for only 15 years, long enough to start mining the islands' phosphate, before Japan seized them in 1914, in the opening months of the First World War.

Between the world wars, Japan governed Palau as part of a territory known as what?

The South Seas Mandate. The League of Nations awarded it in 1920 and Japan ran the whole of it from Palau's main town, where Japanese settlers came to outnumber Palauans.

US forces invaded Peleliu in September 1944 chiefly to capture what?

Its airfield. The US commander forecast a four-day fight, but it lasted more than two months; Admiral Halsey had urged skipping the Palau islands altogether.

What finally persuaded Peleliu's last holdouts to surrender in April 1947?

A Japanese admiral. The men had hidden in the island's caves for two and a half years, believing the war was still on, until the Americans sent a senior Japanese officer to tell them it was over.

Peleliu's Umurbrogol ridge, riddled with fortified caves, earned which nickname from US Marines in 1944?

Bloody Nose Ridge. Engineers had linked its caves by tunnel into a fortress, and the first Marine regiment sent against it took such losses that Army troops had to be brought in.

Which United Nations body suspended its work in 1994 once Palau, its last territory, became independent?

The Trusteeship Council. Palau was the last of the 11 trust territories it supervised, so the council stopped meeting, though on paper it remains one of the UN's six main bodies.

Palau's constitution delayed independence for over a decade by declaring the islands what?

Nuclear-free. The clause could be waived only by a 75 percent vote, so the agreement with Washington failed seven referendums before the bar was amended and an eighth passed in 1993.

Palau became fully sovereign in 1994 under what kind of agreement with the United States?

Compact of Free Association. In return for US aid it lets islanders live, work and study in the United States without a visa, and it took eight referendums over a decade to pass.

What currency does Palau use?

The US dollar. It came with American administration after the Second World War and stayed at independence, and US aid still underpins much of the government's budget.

On 1 January 2020, Palau banned which everyday product to protect its coral reefs?

Certain sunscreens. Lotions containing oxybenzone or nine other chemicals can no longer be sold or even worn in the country, because they are toxic to young coral and other sea life.

The yellow disc set slightly off-centre on Palau's blue flag represents what?

The full moon. Palauans traditionally count it the best time for fishing, planting and harvesting, and the design won a national flag contest in 1979.

On 1 January 1981 Palau raised its own flag and became what?

A republic. Its constitution took effect that day, yet the islands stayed under American administration until full independence in 1994.

Palau's famous Rock Islands are made mostly of what?

Limestone. The islands are old coral reefs lifted out of the sea and deeply undercut at the waterline, which leaves many of them shaped like mushrooms.

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon is Palau's only entry on which list?

World Heritage. UNESCO inscribed the lagoon in 2012 for culture as well as nature: among its mushroom-shaped islands lie stone villages abandoned in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The marine lake on Palau's Eil Malk island is famous for which creatures that cross it daily?

Golden jellyfish. They are a subspecies found in this one lake, and the whole swarm has vanished after strong El Nino years before rebuilding from tiny polyps on the lake walls.

The jellyfish of Palau's Jellyfish Lake cross it daily to follow what?

The sun. Algae in their tissues need the light to make food for them, and staying in sunlit water also keeps the jellyfish clear of the anemones that lie in wait along the shaded edges.

In 2009 Palau announced the world's first national sanctuary for which animal?

Sharks. The president unveiled the fishing ban at the United Nations and urged the world to outlaw finning, saying the animals mattered more than a bowl of soup.

Palau polices about 600,000 square kilometres of ocean, roughly the area of which country?

France. Just two long-range patrol boats, one given by Australia and one by a private foundation, hunt poachers and unlicensed fishing boats across all of it.

Since 2017, visitors to Palau have signed a pledge stamped in their passports promising to do what?

Protect the environment. The Palau Pledge is stamped into each visitor's passport on arrival and has to be signed, a vow to act in ecologically and culturally responsible ways.

Which reptile is native to Palau's mangroves and has killed only one person there in modern history?

That single fatal attack in 1965 triggered an eradication and hide-trade programme; conservation since the 1990s has stabilised numbers.

Mount Ngerchelchuus, Palau's 242-metre high point, stands on which island, the country's largest?

Babeldaob. Volcanic and hilly where most of Palau is low coral, it holds the bulk of the country's land yet only a minority of its people.

The 1996 collapse of the bridge between Palau's two main islands cut off which supplies to the then capital?

Fresh water and electricity. The pipes and cables ran along the span, so its fall, which killed two people, cut both off for most of the population; a new bridge opened in 2002.

Traditional society in Palau passes titles and inheritance how?

Through the mother's clan. The society is strictly matrilineal, and by custom it is a clan's senior women who choose which man will hold its chiefly title.

Which unusual dish is a traditional delicacy in Palau?

Fruit bat soup. A travel vlogger's 2016 video of the dish, filmed in Palau, went viral in 2020 when it was wrongly passed off as footage from Wuhan.

Which sport, introduced under Japan's rule in the 1920s, is still widely played across Palau?

Baseball. It outlasted the rulers who brought it, and Bligh Madris, whose father's family is from Palau, reached the American majors with Pittsburgh in 2022.

Which emperor travelled to Peleliu in 2015 to mark 70 years since the end of the Second World War?

Akihito. He and Empress Michiko came in April 2015 to honour the dead of a battle in which nearly all of the island's 10,000 or so Japanese defenders were killed.

Since 1999 Palau has been one of the few countries to recognise which government?

Taiwan. In 2016 Taipei still had 22 such allies; by 2023 defections to Beijing had cut the list to 13, with Palau among those that stayed.

In 2009 Palau agreed to resettle detainees released from which US facility?

Guantanamo Bay. Six Uyghurs, cleared of being enemy fighters, were flown to Palau because sending them home to China risked persecution.

Surangel Whipps Jr., Palau's president from 2021, lost a 2016 presidential run to which relative?

His brother-in-law. Tommy Remengesau beat him by fewer than 300 votes in 2016; Whipps won the presidency four years later, then defeated Remengesau himself in 2024.

Palau walked out of the Pacific Islands Forum in February 2021 in a dispute over what?

Its secretary-general election. Northern members said an unwritten rota made it their turn, so when their candidate lost by one vote Palau quit and shut its Fiji embassy; the split was called off a year later.

Each of Palau's 16 states elects which official?

Governor. Each of the 16 states has its own governor and its own legislature, a great deal of government for a country of about 20,000 people.

At the 2020 census, which was Palau's largest religious group?

Roman Catholic. Spain's missionaries got there first and the faith outlasted every later ruler, taking in nearly half the islanders; the home-grown Modekngei religion claims about 5 percent.

In 2024 Palau became the first country to ratify a UN treaty protecting what?

The high seas. The treaty covers the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond any country's waters, and it came into force in January 2026, once 60 countries had ratified it.

By what archaic name was Palau once known in English?

The Pelews. Old English books call them the Pelew Islands, a spelling made famous by a popular 18th-century account of a shipwrecked crew's three months there.

Which 2013 super typhoon passed its eye directly over Palau's northern atoll of Kayangel?

Haiyan. Most of Kayangel's 69 residents had ignored an evacuation order, yet all came through winds of up to 250 km/h that wrecked their homes, days before the storm killed thousands elsewhere.

Palau's lagoons shelter what is thought to be the world's most isolated population of which sea mammal?

Dugong. Palau's few hundred at most, known locally as mesekiu, live far from any others; spearing one from a canoe once carried high status, and is now against the law.

The bai, shown on Palau's national seal, traditionally serves a village as what?

A meeting house. A village's chiefs make their decisions there, under beams painted with scenes from Palauan legends, and there were once more than a hundred of them across the islands.

Which airline began flying the weekly Brisbane-Palau 'Palau Paradise Express' in December 2024?

Qantas. The six-hour weekly flight was set up under a contract from the Australian government, which wanted a direct link to strengthen trade, tourism and personal ties with Palau.

Palau's clocks show the same time all year round as those of which capital?

Tokyo. Palau lies almost due south of Japan, so it keeps the same nine-hours-ahead-of-Greenwich time as Japan Standard Time, and neither country moves its clocks in summer.