The Most Remote Places on Earth, and Who Actually Lives There

In 1961, the whole island of Tristan da Cunha packed up and left, not because they were bored, but because a volcano decided it was done waiting. When the eruption finally cooled off, most of them came back anyway, hauling their lives back to a place where the “big city” is a shared internet connection and the “commute” is whatever supply ship shows up.

Then there’s Pitcairn, where about 35 people live on an island that feels like it’s been frozen in time since the HMS Bounty mutineers arrived in 1790. The British government keeps the door cracked open with free land, but almost nobody applies, and the supply ship from New Zealand comes only every three months. And up in Peru, La Rinconada sits at 16,732 feet, crowded by gold miners working in thin, dirty air, with no sewage system and no running water, like the Wild West but with oxygen.

These places are remote, sure, but the real story is who stays, who leaves, and what it costs to do either.

Tristan da Cunha, the Furthest Inhabited Island

The island sits in the South Atlantic, halfway between South America and Africa, technically a British Overseas Territory. The settlement is called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.

Almost everyone there is a fisherman, a farmer, or a government worker. The entire community evacuated to England in 1961 after a volcanic eruption, and most of them came back two years later because they missed home.

According to the official Tristan da Cunha government website, the island has a hospital, a school, a café, and one shared internet connection. The community votes on issues at meetings most adults attend. The only way in is supply ships from Cape Town, running roughly nine times a year.

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Pitcairn Island, Population About 35

In the South Pacific, a single small island holds about three dozen residents, most of them descended from the HMS Bounty mutineers who landed there in 1790. The British government has actively recruited new settlers for years, offering free land to anyone willing to move.

According to the Pitcairn Islands tourism office, the island accepts a small number of approved applicants each year, and almost nobody applies. The next inhabited island is 330 miles away.

The supply ship from New Zealand runs every three months. There is no airstrip. Pitcairn is one of the few places on earth where new residents are wanted and where the spots stay open.

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La Rinconada, Peru, the Highest Town in the World

La Rinconada sits at 16,732 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, higher than every mountain in the continental United States. Around 50,000 people live there, drawn by the gold mining work in the surrounding peaks. The town has no sewage system, no running water, and air with roughly half the oxygen of sea level.

The BBC has reported on La Rinconada multiple times, and journalists who have visited describe it as functionally a Wild West gold rush town frozen at the top of the world. Workers in the gold mines often work without pay for thirty days, then keep whatever ore they can carry on the thirty-first.

The mortality rates from accidents and altitude sickness are high. People go anyway, because the alternative is poverty in the valley villages below.

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Ittoqqortoormiit, East Greenland

The town has roughly 350 residents on the east coast of Greenland, about 500 miles from the next settled community. The mail plane arrives twice a week in summer and twice a month in winter. The harbor is frozen for nine months of the year. Polar bears wander into town with enough regularity that residents carry rifles.

The official Visit Greenland tourism site describes it as the most remote inhabited settlement in the western hemisphere. The Inuit name translates roughly to "place with big houses," a small joke considering the houses are some of the smallest in Greenland. The economy runs on subsistence hunting, fishing, and tourism from the small number of travelers willing to make the trip.

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Oymyakon, Russia, the Coldest Inhabited Place on Earth

The town in eastern Siberia holds the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in a permanently inhabited place. In February 1933, the temperature reached minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit, according to records cited by the Russian Geographical Society. Roughly 500 people live there year-round. Schools close only when the temperature drops below minus 60.

The nearest city, Yakutsk, is over 500 miles away on a road called the Road of Bones, named for the prisoners who died building it during the Stalin era. Cars left running for hours to avoid freezing engine fluid. Pens stop working in the cold. The ground is permafrost, which means burials require thawing the earth with bonfires before a grave can be dug.

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Point Nemo, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility

In the South Pacific, there is a point 1,670 miles from the nearest land in any direction. The closest humans, when the International Space Station passes overhead, are again the astronauts on board rather than anyone on a boat. The point is named after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Point Nemo is so remote that it doubles as a spacecraft graveyard, where space agencies deliberately deorbit retired satellites and spacecraft because the chance of debris hitting anything inhabited is essentially zero. The Russian Mir space station was deorbited in this area in 2001. The International Space Station is expected to follow when it is retired.

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Antarctica, Where People Live for Science

Antarctica has no permanent civilian population, but the research stations are inhabited year-round. McMurdo Station, the largest, has up to 1,000 people in summer and 250 in winter. Concordia Station, jointly run by France and Italy, sits at the Antarctic plateau where winter temperatures average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the sun does not rise for four months.

The continent is also where some of the strangest scientific discoveries are still being made. In 2023, researchers found complex crustaceans 1,500 feet under Antarctic ice, in conditions that should not support that level of life. Around the same time, physicists started reporting bizarre signal anomalies from Antarctic ice that they still cannot fully explain.

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Tristan da Cunha’s residents may have voted at community meetings, but the volcano still overruled the whole schedule in 1961.

And if you think that sounds unbelievable, check out the real stories that sound completely made up, but aren’t.

Two years later, the same people who evacuated to England returned because missing home was apparently stronger than the risk.

Over in Pitcairn, the island is so isolated that even new settlers are rare, despite free land and a supply ship that only runs every three months.

And when you jump from the South Atlantic and the South Pacific to La Rinconada, the gold mines keep pulling people in even without sewage or running water.</p>

Other Genuinely Remote Places

A few more that belong on any honest list:

• Adak, Alaska, the westernmost incorporated US municipality, around 170 residents
• The Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, a French territory with no airport
• Easter Island, around 2,200 miles from the nearest continent
• Hashima Island in Japan, abandoned since 1974
• Mount Roraima in South America, a flat-topped tepui where species evolved in isolation

Genuinely remote places test what humans are willing to do for a place they consider home. Most people will never go to any of them. The communities that exist in these places usually prefer it that way. For places that are remote in a different sense, abandoned and reclaimed, see the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan.

Sometimes “living remote” is just another word for choosing the hard part on purpose.

For another “everyone left at once” moment, read about Hashima Island, where the entire island was evacuated in 1974.