Where the rain is the climate, not the weather
7 of the Rainiest Inhabited Places on Earth
From a Meghalaya village that gets nearly 12 metres of rain a year to a Colombian port where it rains 300 days out of 365.
A handful of places on Earth catch the bulk of the world's rain — they sit where warm, wet air slams into mountains or tropical coastlines. People still live in them. They just own a lot of umbrellas.
How we chose these ↓ — jump to the full scoring system at the bottom of the article.
Hawaii, United States · pop. 50,404
Hilo is the wettest city in the United States, averaging roughly 3,200 mm of rain a year, courtesy of trade winds being lifted by Mauna Kea's slopes immediately west of the city. Hilo International Airport records rain on roughly 275 days a year.
The city has been rebuilt twice in living memory after Pacific tsunamis (1946 and 1960) destroyed the downtown. The Pacific Tsunami Museum, located in a 1930s building that survived both, anchors Hilo's tsunami-research role.
Alagoas, Brazil · pop. 4,722
Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, has a daily afternoon rainstorm so consistent that locals just call it 'as 3 horas' — the 3 o'clock rain. Annual totals average around 3,000 mm and rain falls on roughly 250 days a year.
The city is the principal port for the entire Amazon basin and the gateway to Marajó Island, the world's largest fluvial island. The Ver-o-Peso market on the riverfront, founded in 1625, is one of the largest open-air markets in Latin America.
Davao, Philippines · pop. 4,801
Baguio's mountain location at 1,500 m in the Cordillera traps almost every typhoon passing through northern Luzon. The city holds the Philippine national record for 24-hour rainfall (1,168 mm during Typhoon Carla in 1911) and 72-hour rainfall, and routinely sees seasonal totals over 4,000 mm.
The American colonial administration deliberately chose Baguio as a summer capital because of its cool climate, but the rainy season is genuinely punishing. PAGASA, the Philippine weather service, maintains one of its most important regional offices here.
Sarawak, Malaysia · pop. 349,147
Sarawak's capital, on the island of Borneo, averages around 4,200 mm of rain a year with afternoon downpours so reliable that they effectively function as a daily clock. The city sits in an equatorial climate with no real dry season.
Many of the city's traditional shophouses were built with deep five-foot-way arcades specifically so pedestrians can travel between blocks during downpours without getting wet. The Sarawak River, which the city straddles, is navigable for substantial distances inland thanks to consistent high water.
Gandaki, Nepal · pop. 500,000
Pokhara catches the full force of the Annapurna massif's rain-shadow flip, where monsoon moisture is forced up and dumped on the windward slopes. The city averages around 4,000 mm of rain a year and holds the record for highest annual rainfall ever recorded in Nepal.
The city's two large lakes, Phewa and Begnas, are partly fed by monsoon runoff. Pokhara is also the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit and Annapurna Base Camp treks, which have made tourism the dominant economic sector outside the rainy season.
Valle del Cauca, Colombia · pop. 365,607
Buenaventura, Colombia's main Pacific port, sits on the Chocó Department coast where moist Pacific air meets the western Andes. Several local weather stations record over 7,000 mm of rain a year, and the broader Chocó region is widely considered the wettest non-mountain region in the world.
The city's economy depends heavily on the port, which handles roughly 40% of Colombia's maritime trade, but persistent poverty and infrastructure gaps mean the constant rain compounds public-health problems. Several Colombian and international NGOs have worked on storm-resilient housing in the city.
Meghalaya, India
Mawsynram, a village of roughly 1,000 people in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, holds the unofficial title of wettest inhabited place on Earth, averaging close to 11,900 mm of rain a year. The neighbouring village of Cherrapunji holds most of the historic daily and monthly rainfall records.
The rain comes from the South Asian summer monsoon being funnelled up against the steep Khasi escarpment, releasing almost all of its moisture in a few months. Local houses use grass roofs and bamboo umbrellas called knups, and the famous living root bridges of Meghalaya were engineered specifically to survive monsoon flooding.
How we chose these
We used long-term annual rainfall normals from national meteorological services (the Indian Meteorological Department, IDEAM Colombia, the Nepal Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, PAGASA, NOAA and others), prioritising stations with at least 30 years of continuous data. We required a permanent civilian population, which excludes uninhabited weather-record sites like Cherrapunji's earlier rainfall stations. Where neighbouring localities trade records year-to-year (Cherrapunji vs Mawsynram is a classic example) we chose the one currently considered wettest in long-term averages.
Sources & further reading
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For entertainment only. Rankings on this page are editorial picks compiled from public sources for fun and discovery — they aren't a scientific measurement. Population figures and place details come from open data; see the linked place pages for sources.