Kiribati document photos online

Kiribati is the only nation on Earth that straddles all four hemispheres, and in 1995 it redrew the International Date Line itself to escape an absurdity: its eastern Line Islands once sat a full calendar day behind the capital, so offices on opposite ends of the same country were never open on the same weekday. By bending the line eastward, Kiribati pushed its Line Islands to UTC+14, the most advanced time zone on the planet. The result is that every New Year on every calendar now begins in Kiribati, on a beach in Kiritimati, a full 26 hours before the last inhabited spot on Earth catches up.

• Passport As of the Henley Passport Index's January 2026 update, the Kiribati passport ranks 39th worldwide, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to 122 destinations, surprisingly strong mobility for a nation of fewer than 140,000 people.
• Time & date In 1995 Kiribati unilaterally shifted the International Date Line hundreds of kilometres eastward so that all its islands shared one date, instantly making Kiritimati the first inhabited land on Earth to greet each new day and each New Year.
• Currency Kiribati has no central bank and runs a dual-currency system: it uses the Australian dollar as legal tender while also issuing its own Kiribati dollar pegged 1:1, the last coins of which were minted back in 1992 and are now mainly collectors' items.
• Money quirk Kiribati's old $1 coin copied the twelve-sided shape of Australia's 50-cent piece but was smaller, while its 1989 commemorative $2 coin was round and far larger than Australia's tiny $2 coin, a deliberate reversal of the usual relationship between value and size.
• Geography record Kiritimati (Christmas Island) is the largest coral atoll on Earth by land area at roughly 388 square kilometres, accounting for about half of the entire country's dry land despite Kiribati's territory spreading across 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean.
• Maritime claim Although Kiribati has only about 811 square kilometres of land, its exclusive economic zone covers roughly 3.44 million square kilometres, the twelfth-largest in the world, a vast oceanic domain administered from one of the planet's smallest land bases.
• Statehood Facing sea-level rise, Kiribati in 2014 bought around 20 square kilometres of land on Fiji's Vanua Levu, the first international land purchase by a country preparing for the possible relocation of its citizens, while pursuing a policy it calls 'migration with dignity.'
• Displacement Banaba island was so thoroughly strip-mined for phosphate, about 90% of its surface removed across 80 years, that its people were resettled to Rabi island in Fiji in 1945; their descendants still live there as a community administered with ties to Kiribati.
• Independence Kiribati, the former British Gilbert Islands, became independent only on 12 July 1979, and the contested ownership of its giant Line Islands, including Kiritimati first sighted by Captain Cook on Christmas Eve 1777, was settled in its favour the same year.