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9 Most Remote Places People Live

Counting down to a village so far from everywhere that the only way in is a six-day boat ride. No airport has ever been built there.

Image: NASA

9. Oymyakon, Russia

The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth. Its weather station logged -67.7C in 1933, and around 500 people still get through the winters here.

Photo: Ilya Varlamov, CC BY-SA 4.0

8. Supai, Arizona

About 200 people live on the floor of the Grand Canyon, eight miles from the nearest road. It is the only place in the US where mail still arrives by mule.

7. Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland

Fewer than 400 people on Greenland's east coast. The sea ice locks the harbour for most of the year, so supply ships arrive in a short summer window.

Photo: Jerzystrzelecki, CC BY 3.0

6. Socotra, Yemen

An island 240 km off the Horn of Africa, isolated so long that hundreds of its plants grow nowhere else on the planet, including these dragon's blood trees.

Photo: Valerian Guillot, CC BY 2.0

5. Rapa Nui, Chile

Better known as Easter Island. Mainland Chile is about 3,500 km east, and the nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn, another 2,000 km across open Pacific.

Photo: Vanessa.blasco, CC BY-SA 3.0

4. Kerguelen Islands

This French subantarctic base has no airstrip at all. Everyone and everything arrives by ship from Réunion, 3,500 km away, which calls about four times a year.

Photo: Antoine Lamielle, CC BY-SA 4.0

3. St Helena

A volcanic island 1,950 km off Africa, where the capital is reached by 699 steps. Until the airport opened in 2017, the only way in was a mail ship from Cape Town.

Photo: Luke McKernan, CC BY-SA 2.0

2. Pitcairn Island

Around 40 people live here, most of them descended from the Bounty mutineers. There is no airport, so arriving means a 32-hour boat crossing from Mangareva.

Photo: Henning Axt, CC BY-SA 3.0

1. Tristan da Cunha

About 270 people, 2,400 km from the nearest inhabited island. No airstrip was ever built, so the only route in is a boat from Cape Town that takes about six days.

Photo: The Official CTBTO Photostream, CC BY 2.0

Far, But Not Empty

Every place on this list can be reached — just slowly, and usually by sea. For the people born there, that journey is simply the way home.

Photo: michael clarke stuff, CC BY-SA 2.0
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