So, I got this wild idea the other day – I wanted to find the “remotest city in the world.” Sounds kinda cool and adventurous, right? I started by, well, what else? I hit up Google.
I just typed in “remotest city” and hoped for the best. I got a lot of useless stuff for a start, but I kept scrolling to find the useful imformation. I have seen a website that says “Iquique, Chile” might be it. Hmmm, interesting. Looked it up on a map. Way out there in the Atacama Desert, by the Pacific Ocean. Cool!
Then I thought, “Wait, what makes a city ‘remote’ anyway?” Is it just distance from other big cities? Or is it about how hard it is to get there? Maybe it’s both. So I started looking at different ways to measure this:
- Distance to the nearest large city: I figured I could use a map for this, kinda eyeball it. Iquique seemed pretty far from any other major population centers.
- Travel time: This is trickier. I started looking at flight connections. Turns out, getting to Iquique involves a flight to Santiago (the capital of Chile), and then another flight to Iquique. That’s already two flights!
- Accessibility: I mean, are there even roads? Turns out, yeah, there are, but they go through the desert. Sounds like a long drive!
I spent a good few hours just digging through travel blogs and forums. People who’d actually been to Iquique. Found some amazing photos – seriously, the place looks like another planet. Some folks talked about the long bus rides from other parts of Chile, and how isolated it felt.
My “Research” Process
It wasn’t super scientific, I admit. More like organized internet rambling. I made a little list of potential “remotest cities” based on what I was finding:
- Iquique, Chile
- Maybe somewhere in Siberia?
- A few places in the Australian Outback looked promising too.
I compared travel times as best I could. Flights, buses, even trains (where they existed!). I figured that a combination of long flight times plus limited ground transportation probably meant “remote.”
Iquique just kept coming out on top (or, well, at the bottom, depending on how you look at it).
So, yeah, based on my very informal, totally-not-expert research, I’m gonna say Iquique, Chile is a pretty strong contender for “remotest city in the world.” At least, it’s the remotest one I could find with a few hours of Googling and a lot of curiosity. It definitely made it onto my travel bucket list, though!
