Society
Robinson Crusoe had an estimated population of 859 in 2011 (525 men, 334 women) living in the village of San Juan Bautista. Although the community maintains a rustic serenity dependent on the spiny lobster trade, residents employ a few vehicles, a satellite internet connection, and many television sets. There is an airstrip on the island, near the tip of the island's southwestern peninsula. The flying time from Santiago de Chile is just under three hours, and there is a ferry from the airstrip to San Juan Bautista.
Tourists number in the hundreds per year. One activity gaining popularity is scuba diving, particularly on the wreck of the German light cruiser SMS Dresden, which was scuttled in Cumberland Bay during the Battle of Más a Tierra in World War I.
Read more about this topic: Robinson Crusoe Island
Famous quotes containing the word society:
“‘T is worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance he is admired, but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“Last evening attended Croghan Lodge International Order of Odd Fellows. Election of officers. Chosen Noble Grand. These social organizations have a number of good results. All who attend are educated in self-government. This in a marked way. They bind society together. The well-to-do and the poor should be brought together as much as possible. The separation into classes—castes—is our danger. It is the danger of all civilizations.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)