Seeking solitude? You could do worse than to head to these far corners of the globe.
Australia: Yes, there are less populated places — the South Pole is perhaps the most extreme option. But for secluded locations you might actually want to live in, Australia is full of possibilities. Consider, for starters, the state of the Northern Territory. With a land mass of around 1,424,493 square kilometers, it is more than three times the size of California but has a population of 227,000 (about the same as Birmingham, Alabama). It gets better: More than half (54 percent) of the state’s residents live in the capital, Darwin. That leaves the other 1,424,389 square kilometers to around 100,000 people. Average it out, and each outback loner gets 3,520 acres all to him or herself.
Greenland: The world’s largest island that is not a continent, it makes rural Australia look like Hong Kong. At around 2,165,230 square kilometers, it contains only 57,600 people (more people go to Ohio State University). Such a combination earns Greenland the distinction of having the world’s lowest average population density. If the bustling capital of Nuuk (population 15,100) is too cosmopolitan for your tastes, you could head north toward the settlement of Nord. At around 925km from the North Pole, it has nothing more than a weather station and a handful of people to keep it running.
Pitcairn Islands: Three of these islands, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, are devoid of people; the fourth, Pitcairn itself, has 50 people living on it. Does the name ring a bell? Pitcairn is where nine mutineers from the HMS Bounty, along with the 18 Tahitians who traveled with them, settled in 1790. Most Pitcairnians are descended from these 27 people. Interested real-estate shoppers might take a look at Henderson Island; at around 37 square kilometers, it is the only other habitable land mass in the Pitcairn archipelago.
Svalbard: It is widely agreed that Norway is pretty quiet, as far as countries go (this is meant as a compliment). Svalbard, a Norwegian island territory, goes one step further by being located approximately 640km north of Norway. The 62,160-square-kilometer island is above the Arctic Circle, and residents can look forward to months of either continuous daylight or continuous darkness. About 2,000 of Svalbard’s 2,700 residents live in the town of Longyearbyen. The other 700? Mostly coal miners and scientists. In spite of the land’s glacial austerity, Svalbardians will not necessarily go hungry — the island is also the home of the Global Seed Vault, an underground store of the world’s plant seeds kept safe in case of global catastrophe.
Tristan da Cunha: There is some subjectivity about which place is the most isolated, but the islands of Tristan da Cunha have one inarguable distinction. They are the most remote inhabited place in the world, about 2,736km from Cape Town, the nearest inhabited land mass. The South Atlantic group consists of four islands — Tristan, Nightingale, Gough and Inaccessible — but all 271 Tristanians live on Tristan (perhaps owing to the island’s remoteness, there are only seven surnames among them). Visitors are welcome to Tristan, but new residents have to be approved by the Island Council.
“Given that are no spare houses here,” David Morley, Tristan da Cunha’s administrator, said in an e-mail message, “very little private sector activity/industry and very few available jobs, it would not be a straightforward matter for someone to come here to settle.”
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