There are a number of airports in Kiribati. However, not all Kiribati airports have regularly scheduled flights. We do not list the smallest Kiribati airports, since there is no way to provide you flights from those airports. AirGorilla offers flights, hotels, and rental car reservations for Kiribati.
Kiribati, officially the Republic of Kiribati, is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The country's 33 atolls are scattered over 1,351 square miles (3,500 sq km) near the equator. Its name is pronounced ['kiribas] and is a Kiribati language rendering of "Gilberts", the English name for the main group of islands: the former Gilbert Islands. In Gilbertese there is no letter 's', the sound being represented by 'ti'. That is why the Pacific Island known as Christmas Island is known in the language of Kiribati as Kiritimati Island. This island should not be confused with the Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, which is administered by Australia.
Kiribati has few natural resources. Commercially viable phosphate deposits were exhausted at the time of independence. Copra and fish now represent the bulk of production and exports. Tourism provides more than one-fifth of GDP.
Kiribati was inhabited by a single Micronesian ethnic group that spoke the same Oceanic language for 2,000 years before coming into contact with Europeans. The islands were first sighted by British and American ships in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The islands were named the Gilbert Islands in 1820 by a Russian admiral, Adam von Krusenstern, and French captain Louis Duperrey, after a British captain, Thomas Gilbert, who crossed the archipelago in 1788 ('Kiribati' is the islanders' pronunciation of plural 'Gilberts').
The Gilbert Islands and Ellice Islands gained self-rule in 1971, and were separated in 1975 and granted internal self-government by Britain. In 1978, the Ellice Islands became the independent nation of Tuvalu, and Kiribati's independence followed on July 12, 1979. In a treaty signed shortly after independence and ratified in 1983, the United States relinquished all claims (previously asserted under the Guano Act) to the sparsely inhabited Phoenix Islands and those of the Line Islands that are part of Kiribati territory. ()
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