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Interesting Places
Vestfjorddalen valley · Telemark
Rjukan, Norway: The Town That Built Giant Mirrors to See the Sun
Cut off from direct sunlight for almost six months a year, Rjukan finally solved its century-old problem in 2013 — with three computer-controlled mirrors mounted 450 metres up a mountainside.
Prince William Sound · Alaska
Whittier, Alaska: The Town Where (Almost) Everyone Lives in One Building
Whittier is reached through a single one-lane tunnel, and nearly all 270 residents live in one 14-story building that also contains the school, post office, grocery store, and church.
Boyd County · Nebraska
Monowi, Nebraska: The Incorporated Town With a Population of One
Monowi is the only incorporated municipality in the United States with just one resident. She is the mayor, treasurer, librarian, and bartender — and every year she grants herself a liquor license.
South Australia · the opal capital of the world
Coober Pedy: The Australian Town Where More Than Half the Population Lives Underground
Surface temperatures in Coober Pedy regularly hit 45 °C. So more than half its residents live in cool, climate-stable houses — and even a church and a hotel — carved straight into the sandstone hills.
Lazio · the dying town
Civita di Bagnoregio: The Italian Village Slowly Falling Off Its Own Cliff
An Etruscan village perched on a tower of crumbling tuff, reached only by a long footbridge. Locals have called it 'la città che muore' — the dying town — for nearly five hundred years.
Istria · medieval Glagolitic walls
Hum, Croatia: The 'Smallest Town in the World' (Population 27)
Hum has a town charter from 1102, a population of roughly 27, and is consistently described as the smallest town in the world. Every year an all-male assembly walks into the loggia and elects a mayor.
Drôme · the Diois
Rochefourchat: A French Commune That Has Been Empty for Most of 50 Years
Rochefourchat is a commune in southern France whose recorded population has, since the 1970s, been zero, one, or two — usually exactly one. By law, that single resident is also the mayor.
Pierce County · North Dakota
Rugby, North Dakota: The Town That Claims to Be the Center of North America
For nearly a century, Rugby has claimed — with a stone obelisk and a 1931 US Geological Survey letter — to be the geographic center of North America. A nearby bar has spent the last decade trying to steal the title.
Roane County · West Virginia
Looneyville, West Virginia: A Town Named After a Real Person
Looneyville has had its name — and its post office — since 1870. It is named after Robert Looney, a pioneer settler, and the local Looney family is still there.
Micronesia · Pacific Ocean
Nauru: How the Richest Country Per Capita Mined Itself Into Poverty
In the 1970s Nauru was, briefly, the richest country on Earth per capita — entirely from mining phosphate rock. Today, with the phosphate gone, it is one of the poorest.
Nagasaki Prefecture · Japan
Gunkanjima: The Abandoned Island That Looks Like a Warship
Once the most densely populated place on Earth, Hashima Island's concrete tower blocks now stand crumbling and empty, ringed by a seawall that gave it the nickname Battleship Island.
Columbia County · Pennsylvania, USA
Centralia: The Ghost Town Still Burning Underground
A coal seam fire ignited in 1962 has burned beneath Centralia for over 60 years, turning a once-thriving mining town into a near-empty landscape of cracked highways and steaming ground.
Svalbard · Norway
Longyearbyen: The Arctic Town Where You're Not Allowed to Die
The world's northernmost town of any real size bans burials because bodies don't decompose in the permafrost, and it guards humanity's backup seed supply in a mountain vault nearby.
Puno Region · Peru
La Rinconada: Life and Gold at the Top of the World
Clinging to a glacier at over 5,100 meters above sea level, La Rinconada is the highest permanent human settlement on Earth, a lawless gold-mining boomtown with no running water or sewage system.
Imperial County · California, USA
Slab City: America's Last Free Place
Built on the concrete slabs of an abandoned World War II Marine base in the Sonoran Desert, Slab City is a fully off-grid, rent-free community of squatters, snowbirds, and artists living outside the reach of government services.
East Greenland
Ittoqqortoormiit: Life in the Western Hemisphere's Most Isolated Town
Frozen in by sea ice for up to nine months a year and reachable only by helicopter or boat during a short summer window, Ittoqqortoormiit is one of the most isolated inhabited places on the planet.
Namib Desert · Namibia
Kolmanskop: The Diamond Boomtown Being Swallowed by the Desert
Once a glittering German colonial town built on diamond wealth, Kolmanskop was abandoned by the 1950s and is now slowly being reclaimed by the encroaching sand dunes of the Namib Desert.
Kyiv Oblast · Ukraine
Pripyat: The Soviet Model City Frozen at the Moment of Disaster
Built to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Pripyat was evacuated within 36 hours of the 1986 reactor meltdown and remains a preserved, radioactive snapshot of Soviet life.
Tamil Nadu / Puducherry · India
Auroville: The Utopian City Built for Human Unity
Founded in 1968 as an experimental township devoted to human unity beyond nationality, religion, and politics, Auroville today houses thousands of residents from dozens of countries around a golden meditation sphere called the Matrimandir.
Iya Valley · Tokushima Prefecture, Japan
Nagoro: The Village Where Dolls Outnumber the Living
In a remote mountain valley on Shikoku island, one woman has spent nearly two decades filling her depopulating village with life-sized scarecrows representing former residents, until the dolls vastly outnumber the humans left.
Overijssel · Netherlands
Giethoorn: The Dutch Village With No Roads
In this waterlogged corner of the Netherlands, thatched farmhouses sit on tiny islands linked only by footbridges and canals, and the mail still arrives by boat.
Hadramaut Valley · Yemen
Shibam: The 16th-Century Mudbrick Manhattan
Rising as high as eleven stories from the desert floor, Shibam's mudbrick tower houses form one of the world's oldest examples of urban high-rise planning, built entirely from earth.
Rif Mountains · Morocco
Chefchaouen: Morocco's Blue-Washed Mountain Town
Nestled in the Rif Mountains, this former Andalusian refuge is famous for the countless shades of blue painted across its walls, doorways, and stairways.
Wulingyuan Scenic Area · Hunan, China
Zhangjiajie: The Real Pillars Behind Avatar's Floating Peaks
Thousands of towering sandstone pillars, some over 200 meters tall, rise from the forests of Wulingyuan, providing the visual inspiration for the floating Hallelujah Mountains of Avatar.
Socotra Archipelago · Yemen
Socotra: The Island Time and Evolution Forgot
Isolated in the Indian Ocean for millions of years, Socotra evolved a landscape of umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees and bulbous desert roses found nowhere else on Earth.
Andalusia · Spain
Setenil de las Bodegas: The Spanish Town Tucked Under a Rock
Homes and restaurants in this Andalusian town are built directly into overhanging cliffs, with massive rock ceilings forming the roofs of streets below.
Thessaly · Greece
Meteora: Monasteries Suspended Between Earth and Sky
Byzantine monks built monasteries atop towering sandstone pillars in central Greece, originally accessible only by removable ladders and nets hauled up by rope.
Friuli-Venezia Giulia · Italy
Palmanova: The Renaissance Town Built as a Nine-Pointed Star
Designed from scratch in 1593 as an idealized military fortress, Palmanova was laid out as a perfect nine-pointed star, its geometry still visible from the air today.
Tataouine Governorate · Tunisia
Matmata: The Underground Village Where Star Wars Was Born
Berber families in southern Tunisia have long carved their homes into pits dug deep into the earth, a design later immortalized as Luke Skywalker's childhood home in Star Wars.
Apulia · Italy
Alberobello: The Town of Fairy-Tale Cone-Roofed Houses
More than 1,500 whitewashed stone huts topped with distinctive conical roofs, called trulli, cluster together in this southern Italian town, some marked with mysterious painted symbols.
The Soviet city built entirely on stilts in the Caspian Sea
Neft Daşları
A network of oil platforms and causeways rising from the Caspian, once home to thousands of workers, apartment blocks, and even a bakery, all held up on trestles over open water.
The most remote inhabited island on Earth
Tristan da Cunha
A volcanic speck in the South Atlantic, 2,400 kilometers from the nearest neighbor, home to fewer than 250 people who share just seven surnames.
Capital of the Bounty mutineers' hidden refuge
Adamstown
The smallest capital city in the world, home to fewer than 50 people descended from the mutiny on the HMS Bounty and the Tahitians who joined them.
The last county in China to be connected by road
Motuo County
Hidden in a Himalayan gorge in Tibet, Motuo remained cut off from China's road network until 2013, reachable only on foot or by treacherous mountain trail.
The last place in America where mail arrives by mule
Supai
Deep inside the Grand Canyon, the Havasupai village of Supai remains so remote that the US Postal Service still delivers mail on muleback, six days a week.
One of the only two civilian towns in Antarctica
Villa Las Estrellas
A Chilean settlement on King George Island with a school, a bank, a chapel, and families raising children on the coldest continent on Earth.
Where two World Heritage sites meet at the water's edge
Cape Tribulation
In tropical north Queensland, the ancient Daintree Rainforest spills directly onto beaches lapped by the Great Barrier Reef, the only place on Earth where two such ecosystems touch.
The volcano you can sail a ship straight into
Deception Island
A flooded volcanic caldera in the South Shetland Islands where ships enter through a narrow break in the crater wall into a sheltered harbor above still-active magma.
The densest place humanity has ever built
Kowloon Walled City
A lawless 6.5 acre labyrinth in Hong Kong that packed in over 33,000 residents, existing in a jurisdictional loophole that let it grow unchecked for decades before its 1994 demolition.
The medieval ghost town clinging to an Italian hilltop
Craco
Perched on a cliff in Basilicata, this thousand-year-old town was evacuated after landslides made it unlivable, leaving a perfectly preserved medieval ruin now favored by Hollywood filmmakers.
The land nobody wants
Bir Tawil
A 2,060 square kilometer desert wedge between Egypt and Sudan that both countries refuse to claim.
Two islands, two countries, 21 hours apart
The Diomede Islands
Big Diomede and Little Diomede sit less than three miles apart in the Bering Strait, one belongs to Russia, one to the United States, and they live almost a full day apart in time.
The loneliest place in the ocean
Point Nemo
The spot in the Pacific farthest from any land is so remote that astronauts orbiting overhead are sometimes the closest humans to it, which is why space agencies use it as a spacecraft graveyard.
Home to one of the last uncontacted peoples on Earth
North Sentinel Island
A small island in the Bay of Bengal is off limits to the entire world by law, protecting the Sentinelese, a tribe that has resisted outside contact for tens of thousands of years.
The city that did not officially exist
Zheleznogorsk
A closed Soviet city built to make weapons-grade plutonium was left off maps for decades, and its official crest quietly depicts a bear splitting an atom.
The 18-story city hidden beneath Turkey
Derinkuyu
Carved into soft volcanic rock in Cappadocia, Derinkuyu is an ancient underground city that once sheltered up to 20,000 people, complete with stables, wine presses, and ventilation shafts.
The Australian town erased for its own good
Wittenoom
Contaminated by decades of blue asbestos mining, Wittenoom became so toxic that the government stripped it from official maps and road signs to keep people from moving there.
China's most famous empty city
Ordos Kangbashi
Built for a million residents in the middle of the Inner Mongolian desert, Kangbashi became the poster child for China's ghost cities, vast and gleaming but nearly empty for years.
A neon landscape at the hottest inhabited place on Earth
Dallol
In Ethiopia's Danakil Depression, sulfur springs paint the ground acid yellow and green while average temperatures make Dallol the hottest permanently inhabited settlement on the planet.
The town where the border runs through living rooms
Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog
A tangle of Dutch and Belgian enclaves along the border creates a town where nationality can change from one side of a cafe table to the other, marked by crosses painted on the pavement.
The world's northernmost year-round settlement
Ny-Alesund, Svalbard
A former coal mining town at 78 degrees north now hosts scientists from ten nations studying a rapidly warming Arctic.
White Mars: humanity's closest analog to living off-world
Concordia Station, Antarctica
Perched on the Antarctic Plateau at 3,233 meters, Concordia is so isolated and extreme that space agencies use it to study astronaut psychology.
A Siberian town with the widest temperature swing on Earth
Verkhoyansk, Russia
Verkhoyansk has recorded winter lows near minus 68 Celsius and summer highs above 38 Celsius, an annual range unmatched anywhere on the planet.
Antarctica's largest community, a small city on the ice
McMurdo Station, Antarctica
Home to over 1,000 people at its summer peak, McMurdo runs its own fire department, church, bars, and even a distinct dialect of Antarctic slang.
The island built entirely from clam and cockle shells
Fadiouth, Senegal
Centuries of shellfish harvesting formed an artificial island where streets, cemeteries, and building foundations are made of shells instead of sand.
Garbage City, where a community recycles most of a megacity's waste
Manshiyat Naser, Cairo
The Zabbaleen of Manshiyat Naser have quietly built one of the world's most efficient informal recycling systems, sorting Cairo's trash by hand for generations.
A remote atoll where nearly everyone descends from one Englishman
Palmerston Island, Cook Islands
William Marsters settled Palmerston in the 1860s with three Polynesian wives, and his descendants still govern the island's three family clans today.
A remote peninsula that was once a forced exile colony for leprosy patients
Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaii
For over a century, Hawaii's government forcibly isolated people with Hansen's disease on this cliff-locked peninsula, where Father Damien became a global symbol of compassion.
America's northernmost city, where the sun disappears for 65 days
Barrow (Utqiagvik), Alaska
Utqiagvik endures over two months of unbroken polar night each winter, balanced by an equally long stretch of continuous summer daylight.
The largest city built on solid permafrost
Yakutsk, Russia
Home to over 350,000 people, Yakutsk stands on ground frozen year-round to hundreds of meters deep, forcing every building to sit on stilts.