Samoa document photos online

Samoa once erased an entire day from its calendar to fix its passports' relationship with the rest of the world. At the stroke of midnight on 29 December 2011, the clock jumped straight to 31 December, deleting 30 December and shifting the country westward across the International Date Line so its business week lined up with Australia and New Zealand. It was the second such leap in Samoa's history: 119 years earlier, in 1892, it had jumped the other way to trade more easily with the United States. Few places have rewritten their own date stamp twice for the sake of paperwork and commerce.

• Date line Samoa deleted 30 December 2011 entirely, skipping a day to leap westward across the International Date Line and align its calendar with trade partners Australia and New Zealand.
• Passport The Samoan passport ranked 39th worldwide in the Henley Passport Index in April 2025, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 129 destinations.
• Travel Samoa signed a mutual visa-waiver agreement with the European Union's Schengen Area on 28 May 2015, letting its passport holders enter much of Europe without a visa.
• Currency Samoa's currency, the tala, takes its name from the German 'Thaler' silver coin — a legacy of the era when Samoa was a German protectorate from 1900 to 1914 — and divides into 100 sene.
• Money The tala was introduced only on 10 July 1967, replacing the pound, and was kept at par with the New Zealand dollar until 1975.
• Citizenship In 1982 the Privy Council ruled in Falema'i Lesa's case that Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 were British subjects who became New Zealand citizens in 1949 — a ruling New Zealand swiftly overrode by Act of Parliament.
• Voting ID From independence in 1962 until a 1990 referendum, only holders of a traditional 'matai' chiefly title could vote — Samoa's identity for the ballot box was tied to chiefly status, not ordinary citizenship.
• Independence On 1 January 1962 Samoa became the first Pacific island nation to gain independence in the 20th century, and only in 1997 did it drop 'Western' from its official name.
• Diaspora Samoa is one of only a handful of countries with more nationals living abroad than at home — New Zealand alone counted 213,069 people of Samoan descent in its 2023 census, roughly matching Samoa's entire resident population.