Where on Earth is farthest from everyone? I measured the distance from every patch of land to the nearest town of 1,000 people, the nearest big city and the nearest sea, and went looking for the middle of nowhere on every continent, in every country and in Britain.
There is a long tradition of hunting for the poles of inaccessibility, the points on each continent farthest from the sea. But being far from the sea is not the same as being far from people: the most landlocked spot on Earth, in the Dzungarian basin of north-west China, is 65 km from a town. So I asked a different question. Which places are farthest from any town at all?
To answer it I laid a grid of cells a tenth of a degree across (about 11 km at the equator) over all of the world's land, 2,147,063 cells in all, each weighted by its true area. For every cell I measured the great-circle distance to the nearest of 171,737 places with 1,000 or more people in the GeoNames gazetteer, to the nearest of 3,089 cities of 100,000 or more and 505 of a million or more in Natural Earth, and to the nearest coast. Then I looked for the maxima. Use the map below to switch between the four kinds of nowhere, pick a country to find its most remote point, or click anywhere to measure it.
Colours: great-circle distance from each point on land to the nearest place in the chosen set, on a 0.1° grid. Circles: the most remote point of each continent's mainland for the chosen measure; small dots (Map layers): the most remote point of every country and territory from a town. Click anywhere on land to measure it; the town search loads 171,737 places on first use. The Mercator map stops at 85° south, so the far interior of Antarctica is cut off. Data: GeoNames cities1000 (CC BY 4.0), Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri; place labels © OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles, OpenStreetMap contributors.
Most of the land is not far from someone. Half of all land outside Antarctica lies within 40 km of a town of 1,000 people, and 36% within 25 km. But 24.6% of it, 33.1 million square kilometres, is more than 100 km from the nearest town, and 1.3%, 1.77 million square kilometres, more than 500 km. Big cities are much sparser: 46% of the land is more than 500 km from a city of a million.
How much of the land lies within a given distance
Share of the world's land outside Antarctica within each distance of a town, a city of 100,000+, a city of a million and the sea. Log scale. Hover the chart.
The nowhere is concentrated in the far north and in the deserts. Land north of 60°N is 13% of the land outside Antarctica, but it holds 35% of the land more than 100 km from a town and 93% of the land more than 500 km away. Further south the peaks are the dry belts around the tropics: the Sahara and Arabia in the north, the Australian deserts and the Kalahari in the south.
Far from any town, by latitude
Share of the land in each 5° band of latitude that is more than 100 km and more than 500 km from a town. Antarctica excluded. Hover a bar.
On the mainland of each continent, the point farthest from a town is:
The most remote point of each mainland, four ways
Kilometres from the most remote point of each continent's mainland to the nearest town, city of 100,000+, city of a million and coast. Click a bar to see the point on the map.
Islands are another matter. Nobody counts a town on a rock in the Southern Ocean, so the most remote land outside Antarctica is Marion Island, one of South Africa's Prince Edward Islands, 1,749 km from Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape. Next come the Crozet Islands, 1,419 km from Port-aux-Français, the French research base on Kerguelen. In the Arctic, Cape Columbia at the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, the northernmost point of Canada, is 1,170 km from Pond Inlet, and the north coast of Greenland 1,162 km from Longyearbyen. 93% of Greenland is more than 100 km from a town.
The big islands
The fifteen largest islands with their most remote point from a town and the share of each island more than 100 km from one. Click a row to see it on the map.
The classic pole of inaccessibility, the land farthest from any coast, is in Eurasia, in the Dzungarian basin of Xinjiang near the borders with Kazakhstan and Mongolia. It is usually placed at about 46°17′N 86°40′E. On the Natural Earth coastline I find the farthest point from the sea at 45.83°N 88.76°E, 2,478 km from the nearest coast and 169 km from that published position, where my coastline gives 2,382 km. The exact spot depends on how finely the coast is drawn and on what counts as sea, so the difference is not surprising. What is surprising is how ordinary the place is: 65 km from Kalabulegen, and 244 km from Ürümqi, a city of several million.
The other continental poles from the sea fall where published calculations put them: near Obo in the Central African Republic (1,820 km from the coast), in South Dakota (1,642 km), in Mato Grosso in Brazil (1,498 km) and west of Alice Springs in Australia (934 km). None of them is far from a town.
Famous empty places, checked
The most remote point from a town inside each region, and the share of the region more than 100 km from one. Click a row to see it on the map.
For each of 210 countries and 29 territories I found the point inside its borders farthest from any town, in that country or not. Counting islands, the top of the list belongs to countries with remote outposts: South Africa's Marion Island, Canada's Ellesmere Island, the north of Greenland, the western Aleutian Islands of the United States, 977 km from Nikol’skoye in Russia, and Russia's Franz Josef Land, closest to Longyearbyen on Svalbard. On each country's main land mass, Greenland leads, then Russia, Australia, Sudan and Canada.
The most remote point of each country's main land mass
Countries over 100,000 km². Kilometres to the nearest town; purple bars: the nearest town is in another country. Click a bar to see the point.
The nearest town is often across a border. For 34 countries the most remote point is closest to a town in another country: the deep Sahara of Libya is nearest to Fada in Chad, Egypt's to Al Jawf in Libya, Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter to Rumāh in Yemen. At the other end, 23 countries have nowhere more than 10 km from a town, and the median country's most remote point is 72 km from one.
All countries and territories
Most remote point from a town (anywhere in the country, islands included), the nearest town, and the share of the land more than 100 km from a town. Click a heading to sort, a row to see it on the map.
Antarctica has research stations but no towns, and none of its stations is in the gazetteer, so on this measure the whole continent is nowhere. Every point of it is at least 879 km from a town, half of it is more than 3,180 km away, and the most remote point, on the polar plateau at 85.29°S 140.56°E, is 4,367 km from Puerto Williams. That is why I report Antarctica separately and leave it out of the world shares. Its farthest point from the coast, on the Natural Earth outline, which follows the land rather than the floating ice shelves, is 1,139 km inland.
In a crowded country remoteness shrinks to tens of kilometres. Half of the island of Great Britain is within 4.2 km of a town of 1,000 people. The most remote spot on the British mainland is near Cape Wrath, the north-west tip of Scotland, 82 km from Ullapool, and almost all of the ten most remote spots are in the Highland council area. 53% of mainland Scotland is more than 10 km from a town, against 3.4% of England.
The most remote spots in the United Kingdom
The ten most remote spots on the island of Great Britain, at least 30 km apart, and the most remote point of each nation. Click a row to see it on the map.
England's most remote spot is in Kielder Forest in Northumberland, 24 km from a town, and the nearest town is Langholm, across the border in Scotland. Counting islands, Lundy in the Bristol Channel beats it at 36 km. In Wales the most remote spot is the very tip of the Llŷn Peninsula, 23 km from Nefyn: on an island as busy as Britain, the end of a peninsula is often farther from a town than any moorland. In Northern Ireland it is in the Sperrin Mountains, 20 km from Draperstown.
Data. Towns are the 171,737 places in the GeoNames cities1000 gazetteer, which lists every populated place with 1,000 or more people (packaged by lutangar/cities.json, commit e5e759c56751bd7329e29c576f6a9e77607b424e). It has no population figures, so the larger cities come from Natural Earth's populated places, 7,342 of them, of which 3,089 have 100,000 or more people and 505 a million or more. Land and coast are Natural Earth's 1:50m land outlines; lakes count as land and the Caspian Sea as sea. Countries are Natural Earth's 1:10m outlines.
Method. A 0.1° grid over the land (2,147,063 cells), each cell weighted by its true area on the sphere so that the small cells near the poles are not over-counted. Distances are great-circle distances on a sphere of radius 6371.0 km, found with a k-d tree on unit vectors. Each maximum was refined on a 0.01° grid, so positions are good to about a kilometre. A country's most remote point is the point inside its outline farthest from any town, wherever the town is. Continental mainlands are the Natural Earth land polygons, so a few islands that the 1:50m outline joins to the mainland across narrow straits count as mainland; Europe and Asia are split along the Urals.
What this is not. GeoNames cities1000 misses villages and hamlets under 1,000 people, so "far from a town" does not mean uninhabited: the far north of Canada has Inuit hamlets, the Sahara oases, and Antarctica research stations. It also keeps a few smaller places as administrative seats, such as the base at Port-aux-Français on Kerguelen. Straight-line distance is not travel time: 50 km of Highland bog or Amazon forest can take longer to cross than 500 km of desert road. For travel time, see the Malaria Atlas Project's global map of accessibility to cities for 2015 (Weiss and others, Nature, 2018), which measures something different and complementary. Natural Earth city populations are estimates of varying age.