At the edge of the desert, on the frozen tundra, surrounded by jungle or open ocean – five cities that have no business existing where they do. And yet they thrive.
Perth: 2,100 km to Adelaide
Yakutsk: Very Isolated; -64°C Recorded
Iquitos: No Road Access
Honolulu: 3,841 km from SF
Nuuk: No Roads to Neighbours
In 1962, astronaut John Glenn made three orbits of the Earth. As he passed over the night side of Australia, he looked down at a continent wrapped in darkness – and noticed a single cluster of light in the vast black.
The people of Perth, having heard he was coming, had turned on every light in the city. It was, Glenn said, like seeing a small campfire at the end of the world. The world’s most isolated major city, waving at the cosmos.
What does it mean for a city to be isolated? Not a village, not a research station – but a proper city, with hundreds of thousands of people, hospitals, universities, traffic jams, and all the ordinary machinery of urban life – existing in a place that geography seems to actively resist.
The cities in this article each qualify in a different way. Some are surrounded by desert. Some by ocean. Some by permafrost. One by jungle so dense that there is not a single road leading out of it.
What they share is the particular character that isolation creates: a self-reliance, a local pride, and an almost defiant prosperity that seems to say – we know where we are, and we built here anyway.
01 Western Australia: Perth
The Wealthy Hermit
Nearest city (100K+): Adelaide · 2,104 km
Distance to Sydney (by road): ~3,290 km
Population: 2.3 million as of 2023 (Closer to Jakarta, Indonesia, than to Sydney, Australia, by 300 km)
The statistics of Perth’s isolation are almost comedic. The nearest city with a population of more than 100,000 is Adelaide, over 2,100 kilometres away. Perth is geographically closer to Timor-Leste and Jakarta than it is to Sydney.
To drive to Adelaide, you cross the Nullarbor Plain (from the Latin nullus arbor, “no trees”) – a 1,700-kilometre limestone plateau that offers nothing in the way of scenery except the longest straight stretch of road on Earth and the growing suspicion that you may have made a mistake.
The road trip takes at least two days and is considered something of a rite of passage. Most Perthites have never attempted it.
Did you know:
People in Perth refer to residents of Sydney and Melbourne as “the Eastern Staters” – as if they live in a different country.
The phrase captures something real: Perth operates on its own time zone (two hours behind Sydney), has its own economy driven by mining rather than finance, and has developed a cultural identity so distinct that visiting Perth from the east coast can feel genuinely like international travel.
The paradox of Perth is that its isolation has made it rich rather than poor. Western Australia sits above one of the most mineral-rich geological formations on the planet (iron ore, gold, lithium, nickel) and Perth serves as the headquarters for the mining operations that extract and export them.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a series of mining booms propelled Perth into the role of regional headquarters for significant mining operations, making it Australia’s fourth-most populous city.
For a period in the early 2010s, during the height of the resources boom, Perth had the highest average house prices in Australia and one of the highest concentrations of millionaires per capita in the world.
The isolation has also created something harder to quantify: a character. Perth’s relative isolation has been considered a key factor in the development of a distinct and tight-knit music scene, with many bands and artists hailing from the city – including Tame Impala, Pendulum, and the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott.
When major international tours bypass the city, which happens regularly, given the cost of adding a Perth date to an Australian itinerary, local musicians fill the gap. The result is a music culture that owes nothing to geography and everything to necessity.
Perth is the sunniest capital city in the country and possibly in the world – the sun shines for an average of eight hours a day throughout the entire year, regardless of season.
The combination of the Indian Ocean beaches, the reliable sunshine, and the outdoor culture it has produced give Perth a quality of life that consistently places it near the top of global liveability surveys.
It is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinarily good place to live – and it happens to be further from another major city than any comparable urban area in the world.
02 Siberia, Russia: Yakutsk
The Frozen Vault of Diamonds
Record low temperatures: -64.4°C (1891)
Average January low: -42°C (-43.6°F)
Population: ~355,000
World’s diamonds: ~20% from This Region
Yakutsk is the coldest major city in the world. Average monthly temperatures range from -36.9°C in January to +19.9°C in July, making the seasonal temperature difference one of the greatest on Earth. In some cases the difference is over 100°C between winter and summer extremes.
In January, the city receives fewer than four hours of daylight. The frozen Lena River, too cold for a bridge to be viable, is crossed by ferry in summer and driven across on ice in winter.
For several weeks in spring and autumn, when the river is neither frozen enough to drive on nor open enough for boats, the city is effectively cut off from road access entirely.
“It is not a good idea to walk out in the streets in winter when the temperature falls below -40°C. The air is so cold that hot air from houses, people, and cars cannot rise – the city wraps itself in a layer of freezing fog that reduces visibility to less than five metres.”
– NORTH-EASTERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY, YAKUTSK, ADVISORY TO INCOMING STUDENTS
Yakutsk was once known as “the prison without walls.” The only road in and out was historically called the “Road of Bones” – built by Stalin’s gulag prisoners, whose bodies were reportedly buried beneath the road they constructed.
Today, the Lena Highway connects the city to the broader Russian road network, but only conditionally, crossing the river on ice in winter and requiring a ferry crossing in summer. There is no bridge or road anywhere in the Sakha Republic that crosses the Lena River.
So why do more than 355,000 people live here? The answer is under their feet. Around 20% of the world’s diamonds come from mines in the Yakutsk region.
Coal and gold are also major exports, and the city’s annual export volume reached $5.55 billion in 2021. The diamond company ALROSA, which operates the mines, effectively underpins the city’s economy and provides stable employment for a significant proportion of the population.
Survival in Yakutsk
Glasses are a hazard in winter – the metal frames freeze to skin on contact. Cars are left running for months rather than risk a frozen engine.
Buildings are raised on stilts to prevent the warmth of habitation from thawing the permafrost beneath – which would cause them to sink.
Outdoor fish markets require no refrigeration. The fish freeze instantly and are stacked upright like bouquets.
03 Loreto Region, Peru: Iquitos
The City Without Roads
Population: ~500,000
Road access: None
Nearest road city: Multiple days by river
Surrounded by: Amazon rainforest
There are cities you can only reach by air. There are cities you can only reach by sea. Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, can be reached by air or by boat, through several weeks of river navigation upstream from the Atlantic coast.
What it cannot be reached by is road. There is not a single road connecting Iquitos to any other city in Peru, or in the world. This makes it the largest city on Earth that is inaccessible by road, with a population of approximately 500,000 people.
The city sits at the confluence of the Nanay, Itaya, and Amazon rivers, deep in the Loreto region – the largest region in Peru by area, almost entirely covered in tropical rainforest. To the east, west, and south, the jungle extends for hundreds of kilometres without interruption.
To the north, the same. The Amazon River, which passes near the city, is one of the world’s great waterways, but it flows east toward the Atlantic – the wrong direction for most of Peru’s population, which lives on the coast or in the Andean highlands.
Iquitos has its own peculiar history of boom and bust. During the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city was one of the wealthiest in South America.
Rubber barons built European-style mansions along the riverfront, imported tiles from Portugal, and sponsored operas in a city accessible only by the same jungle that made them rich.
When the rubber market collapsed (partly due to British-grown rubber from seeds smuggled out of the Amazon) the boom evaporated almost overnight, and the mansions began their slow subsidence into the jungle.
Today, the tiled facades of Rue Belen are still there, faded and beautiful, as a reminder of what isolation can produce when the conditions are temporarily right.
Supplying a City Without Roads
Everything that cannot be produced locally in Iquitos must arrive by air or river. This includes fuel, vehicles (shipped by barge), construction materials, and most consumer goods.
The motokar (a motorized three-wheeled vehicle) is the city’s primary form of transport, since normal car ownership is impractical given the cost of shipping vehicles upriver.
The markets along the waterfront sell produce from the jungle: exotic fruits, freshwater fish, medicinal plants, and the bewildering variety of Amazonian wildlife that makes Iquitos one of the great biodiversity hotspots on Earth.
04 Hawaii, USA: Honolulu
The Loneliest Archipelago
Nearest continent: 3,841 km from San Francisco
Distance from Tokyo: 6,200 km
Population of Oahu: ~1 million
Food imported: ~85-90% of supply
By some measures, Honolulu is the most isolated city in the world – 3,841 kilometres from San Francisco, the nearest large city, with no other major population centre accessible in any direction.
Hawaii is the most geographically isolated archipelago on Earth, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean in every direction.
The nearest land to the Hawaiian Islands in any direction is Johnston Atoll (an uninhabited coral island) roughly 1,300 kilometres to the southwest. The nearest continent is North America, nearly four thousand kilometres to the east.
The price of this isolation is visible in supermarkets. A carton of milk in Honolulu routinely costs double what it costs in Los Angeles.
Fresh produce, construction materials, fuel, and consumer goods all carry what locals call the “paradise tax” – the additional cost of shipping everything across thousands of kilometres of open Pacific.
Hawaii imports approximately 85 to 90 percent of its food supply, making it extraordinarily vulnerable to any disruption in shipping or air freight.
From Isolation to Crossroads
Honolulu’s transformation from one of the world’s most isolated outposts into one of its busiest tourism hubs is almost entirely a story of aviation.
Before commercial flight, reaching Hawaii from the mainland required a week at sea. Regular commercial air service began in 1936, and by the 1960s the jet age had turned the islands into the most visited destination in the Pacific.
Today, Honolulu International Airport handles over 20 million passengers annually – a figure that would have been incomprehensible to the island’s pre-contact population of roughly 300,000.
05 Greenland, Kingdom of Denmark: Nuuk
A Capital Without Connections
Population: ~19,000
Road connections: Zero – to any other town
Greenland size: 2.1 million km² (largely uninhabitable)
Nearest large city: Reykjavik · ~1,750 km
Nuuk is the world’s smallest capital city by population – approximately 19,000 people – and arguably its most peculiar.
It is the capital of Greenland, the world’s largest island and one of its least habitable, covered 80 percent by an ice sheet that averages two kilometres in thickness.
The city has no road connections to any other settlement in Greenland. Every other town on the island is accessible only by air, boat, or dogsled – there are no roads connecting Nuuk to anywhere.
What makes Nuuk particularly interesting in the context of isolation is how ordinary it has become despite these conditions.
The city has modern apartment blocks, a university, a couple of decent restaurants serving Greenlandic cuisine (musk ox, Arctic char, whale), a cultural centre, and a harbour full of fishing boats.
The Greenlandic people – the Inuit, who have lived here for 4,500 years – did not merely survive in this environment. They built a civilisation adapted to it with a sophistication that European explorers consistently underestimated.
The Geopolitics of Isolation
Greenland has become one of the most strategically contested territories in the world. Its location between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, its enormous potential mineral wealth (rare earth elements, oil, and gas exposed by melting ice), and its US military presence at Thule Air Base make it a geopolitical prize.
In 2019, US President Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland from Denmark. In 2025, he proposed it again. Nuuk, population 19,000, has suddenly found itself at the centre of international attention it never sought.
The Advantage of Being Far Away
The cities in this article share almost nothing in climate, culture, or history. What they share is the particular relationship between a community and the geography that surrounds it – a relationship in which isolation, rather than being a deficit, has become a defining characteristic.
Perth’s isolation built a music scene and a mining economy. Yakutsk’s isolation preserved an indigenous culture around the diamond mines. Iquitos’s isolation made it briefly one of the world’s wealthiest cities, then allowed it to maintain a relationship with the Amazon that development corridors have destroyed elsewhere. Honolulu’s isolation made it expensive and then beautiful. Nuuk’s isolation kept it small enough that it is still recognisably itself.
There is something worth paying attention to in this. In a world that measures success by connectivity, by trade links and internet bandwidth and flight routes, these cities suggest that isolation has its own kind of value. The places that are hardest to reach are often the places that have retained most clearly a sense of what they are. The distance is not a bug. It is, in many cases, the point.
In 1962, John Glenn spotted Perth from space and the city turned on its lights. The gesture was not a cry for help. It was a greeting – the confidence of a city that knows exactly where it is, and has made peace with the distance.
That, perhaps, is the real lesson of the world’s most isolated cities: that remoteness, confronted honestly and inhabited fully, stops being a limitation and starts being an identity.
Wikipedia – Perth, Western Australia
National Geographic – Look Inside the World’s Coldest City
TIME – Yakutsk: The Coldest City on Earth
CNN – Inside Yakutsk when the temperature drops to −80
Encyclopaedia Britannica – Iquitos, Peru
Encyclopaedia Britannica – Honolulu, Hawaii
Encyclopaedia Britannica – Nuuk, Greenland
BBC Science Focus – What is the coldest city in the world?
Outlook Traveller – Inside Yakutsk: Life at −50°C (2026)
/Important: This article is an editorial feature based on publicly available geographic, demographic, and cultural information. Population figures reflect the most recently available estimates. The isolation rankings mentioned (Perth, Honolulu) are subject to how “isolation” is defined – by road distance, straight-line distance, or nearest equivalent-population city. All interpretations are noted in the text./
