The Most Isolated Town In The World: Tristan Da Cunha 🗿

It takes 6 days by boat to get there, 200 people live there (🗿Amazing Places Series)

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The Most Isolated Town In The World

Tristan Da Cunha

»UPDATE: (This story includes an update at the end - we spoke to people from here!)

There’s lots of far off places that take a long time or are hard to get to. But how far is too far? You can go nonstop from New York to Singapore in 20 hours (“worlds current longest flight”). A boat to the Galapagos from Ecuador takes about 3 days  (but I hear u get great food on the way..something like that). But to get to the the worlds most isolated town, it takes 6 days by boat and the trip is made no more than a dozen times per year, if you’re lucky.

Tristan De Cunha is called the world’s most remote community. It is more than 1700 miles from the closest continent (Africa - South Africa) and 1500 miles from the next nearest inhabited island (st Helena). It’s too rocky for an airport and has no natural harbors.

Despite all of that, its been the year-round home to a couple hundred people whose ancestors came from the UK a century ago.

Tristan is part of a small volcanic island chain in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was first seen by explorers in the 1500s but no one lived there until the 1800s. Residents built up over time and there’s been a couple hundred people living there since the late 1800s.

The island has sometimes gone years without an outsider’s visit. (from 1909 to 1919, no ships recorded landing there for 10 years).

Because of this isolation, Tristanians have developed thier own way of doing things… they speak in their own dialect that’s considered the most isolated variety of English in the world, they celebrate unique holidays (most of which are forms of older British traditions that never went out of style). They are extremely self sufficient, and don’t have to rely on any regular supplies from the outside. Before regular news and live tv which came in 2001, news was spotty. Tristanians learned of the end of the World War I only when a ship stopped by to tell them the news 8 months later. 

But there’s hope! You can be one of the lucky few to visit now. A few adventure cruises go by each year.

»UPDATE!!: I was able to talk with Tristanians who live there! They are fantastic people… meet them here: Q&A with Residents of Tristan Da Cunha