Unusual and unknown places

Five Remote Corners of the Planet Where Reality Still Seems Incomplete

There is a rare sensation that contemporary travel seems to have almost forgotten: the authentic wonder of the unknown. In the age of satellite maps, drones and geolocated photographs, we are convinced that the planet has now been completely explored. And yet, it is enough to move away from the most predictable routes to discover that the Earth still preserves territories capable of destabilising the imagination. Places that seem to belong to fantasy novels, cities born by mistake, forgotten islands, deserts where silence becomes almost physical, lakes that appear and disappear like mirages.

Unusual places continue to remind travellers that some of the world’s most extraordinary destinations remain far beyond conventional tourism routes.

Contemporary geography is not merely a matter of coordinates: it is above all a narrative geography. Some places remain invisible not because they are impossible to reach, but because they exist at the margins of collective attention. And it is precisely this invisibility that makes them extraordinary. In these remote spaces, travel once again takes on a primordial meaning: not the consumption of images, but discovery.

There are villages where only a few dozen people live isolated from the rest of the world, deserts that preserve inexplicable geological anomalies, submerged forests, islands beaten only by wind and salt. In these territories, human beings cease to be at the centre of the scene and return to being simple observers.

The five places selected in this itinerary represent different forms of the unusual: a ghost town in the African desert, a volcanic island forgotten by the ocean, an underground lake hidden beneath the ice, a village suspended in time and a mineral desert that seems to come from another planet. More than destinations, they are geographical and cultural anomalies that reveal how much the world is still capable of surprising us.

1. Kolmanskop, Namibia

The Ghost Town Devoured by the Desert

Coordinates: 26.7036° S, 15.2285° E

In southern Namibia, not far from the Atlantic coast, there is a city that the desert is slowly swallowing. The dunes enter through the windows, occupy the bedrooms, submerge the pianos and climb the staircases like a motionless sea.

Kolmanskop was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century during the diamond rush in German Africa. Legend has it that a railway worker accidentally found a bright stone in the sand. It was a diamond. Within a few years, in the absolute emptiness of the Namib, a small European town arose, complete with a hospital, casino, ballroom, school and even an ice factory.

For decades, Kolmanskop was one of the richest towns in southern Africa. Its inhabitants lived in an unreal bubble of luxury and isolation. French champagne, German furniture, musical instruments and European porcelain arrived while outside stretched one of the oldest deserts on Earth.

Then, suddenly, the diamonds diminished.

In the 1950s, the town was abandoned. The desert then began its slow work of reconquest. Today, Kolmanskop appears like a post-apocalyptic dream: perfectly preserved rooms where the sand forms dunes reaching the ceiling, corridors immersed in an unreal light, windows opening onto emptiness.

The most disturbing sensation is not the ruin, but the silence. The wind passes through the buildings like a continuous breath. Every object seems to have remained suspended at the moment of abandonment.

Kolmanskop represents a powerful metaphor for human fragility: a town built upon sudden wealth and slowly erased by geology.

2. Hashima Island, Japan

The Abandoned Island-City Where Concrete Resists the Ocean

Coordinates: 32.6272° N, 129.7387° E

Off the coast of Nagasaki, a grey silhouette emerges that resembles a battleship on the horizon. For this reason, Hashima Island is nicknamed Gunkanjima, “Battleship Island”.

Today, it is completely deserted.

And yet, for decades, Hashima was one of the most densely populated places on the planet. On just sixteen acres of rock, more than five thousand people lived crammed into enormous reinforced-concrete buildings constructed directly on the ocean.

The island was exploited by Mitsubishi at the end of the nineteenth century for underwater coal mining. Around the mines, a vertical micro-city gradually arose: schools, apartments, public baths, cinemas, hospitals and shops compressed into a tiny space continuously battered by typhoons.

Hashima represented the industrial future of Japan.

Then coal lost its importance.

In 1974, the mine was suddenly closed. The inhabitants left the island within a few weeks, abandoning apartments, everyday objects, televisions and bicycles. Since then, Hashima has remained frozen in time.

The sea slowly began to destroy it.

The walls of the buildings are corroded by salt, the windows open onto the ocean and the stairways are invaded by the wind. Walking among the abandoned structures produces a profoundly disturbing sensation: it feels like crossing the wreckage of a failed futuristic civilisation.

For years, the Japanese government completely prohibited access because of the risk of collapse. This isolation helped to transform Hashima into a contemporary urban legend. Photographs of the island began to circulate online like images from a post-apocalyptic world.

The atmosphere is made even more intense by the total absence of nature. Unlike many abandoned cities reclaimed by vegetation, here concrete dominates. A continuous grey, interrupted only by the ocean.

Hashima is also a historically controversial place. During the Second World War, Korean and Chinese forced labourers were employed there under extremely harsh conditions. This complex memory adds further depth to the island’s silence.

Hashima is not merely an industrial ruin: it is the ultimate symbol of the speed with which progress can become abandonment. A fragment of modernity suspended in the sea, where time seems to have suddenly stopped.

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Hashima Island also became famous as a film set and visual inspiration for numerous international productions because of its highly dramatic post-apocalyptic appearance.

The best-known example is the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. Within the film’s narrative universe, the island is transformed into the abandoned lair of the villain Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem. Some sequences were actually filmed near Hashima, while many of the settings were later reconstructed in a studio for safety reasons.

The island’s aesthetics have also influenced video games, documentaries and international photographic productions because of its unique image: enormous brutalist buildings corroded by the sea, empty windows, deserted corridors and absolute silence.

Hashima also appears in:

the Japanese film Attack on Titan

numerous documentaries by National Geographic and Discovery Channel

photographic reports dedicated to haikyo, Japanese urban ruins

productions devoted to the contemporary aesthetics of “ruin porn”

Its cinematic power derives above all from a rare element: Hashima does not look like a constructed set, but like a place that has genuinely survived an invisible catastrophe.

3. Coober Pedy, Australia

The Underground Town Where People Live Beneath the Desert

Coordinates: 29.0137° S, 134.7546° E

In the heart of the Australian Outback, there is a town where a large part of the population lives underground.

Coober Pedy initially appears to be an incomprehensible place: a flat, arid, almost lunar landscape dotted with thousands of mounds of earth. Then the reason becomes clear. Beneath that surface lies an entire town carved into the rock.

The outside temperature can exceed 50 degrees. To survive the extreme heat, the inhabitants transformed old opal mines into underground homes known as “dugouts”. Inside, there are bedrooms, hotels, churches, pubs and even museums.

The town was founded in 1915 following the discovery of enormous opal deposits. Miners from more than forty countries arrived in this remote corner of Australia, pursuing sudden fortunes. Many lived in extremely harsh conditions, isolated from the rest of the world for months.

Even today, Coober Pedy retains something profoundly cinematic. It is no coincidence that films such as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Pitch Black were shot here. The surrounding landscape seems to belong to science fiction: endless mineral expanses, red rocks, dazzling light and absolute silence.

But the town’s true fascination is psychological. Living underground completely changes the relationship with space, time and light. Entering a house carved into the rock produces an alienating sensation: the outside world suddenly disappears, replaced by cool, muffled silence.

Coober Pedy is one of the most extreme examples of human adaptation to a hostile environment. A place born not from aesthetics, but from necessity.

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4. Lake Vostok, Antarctica

The Lake Hidden Beneath Four Kilometres of Ice

Coordinates: 77.5000° S, 106.0000° E

There is a lake almost as large as Sardinia, completely hidden beneath the Antarctic ice.

No one has ever seen it directly.

Lake Vostok lies beneath approximately four kilometres of ice sheet and remained unknown until the 1990s, when satellite radar images revealed the presence of an enormous body of liquid water trapped beneath Antarctica.

Its existence revolutionised the understanding of extreme ecosystems.

Scientists believe that the lake has remained isolated from the rest of the planet for millions of years. This means that it could contain completely unknown forms of life that evolved independently from the contemporary terrestrial biosphere.

The idea is almost dizzying: beneath one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on Earth, an autonomous ecosystem could exist.

The Russian Vostok Station, located above the lake, is itself one of the most extreme places on the planet. One of the lowest temperatures ever measured on Earth was recorded here: −89.2°C.

Lake Vostok also represents something more profound. It proves that the planet still preserves enormous physical secrets. In a world we believe to be completely explored, invisible oceans still exist beneath the ice.

Many astrobiologists study Vostok to understand how life might develop in the frozen oceans of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, or Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. In this sense, the lake is not only a terrestrial mystery: it is a window onto the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

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5. Tristan da Cunha

The Most Isolated Island on the Planet

Coordinates: 37.1052° S, 12.2777° W

In the middle of the South Atlantic, extremely far from any continent, lies Tristan da Cunha: the most isolated permanent human settlement on Earth.

The island is more than 2,400 kilometres from the nearest inhabited land. There is no airport. The only way to reach it is to undertake days of navigation across the ocean.

Approximately 250 people live here.

The community descends from a small number of original settlers: sailors, shipwreck survivors and soldiers. Even today, many inhabitants share the same surnames. Everyday life follows rhythms completely different from those of the rest of the world. There are no luxury hotels, traffic, invasive advertising or mass tourism.

The island is dominated by an active volcano and cliffs continuously battered by the Atlantic wind. The climate is harsh, changeable and often hostile. But it is precisely this difficulty that has created a very strong sense of community.

In 1961, a volcanic eruption forced all the inhabitants to evacuate to the United Kingdom. And yet, once the emergency had ended, almost all of them decided to return to the island. They could not adapt to modern English life.

This detail reveals a great deal about Tristan da Cunha: it is not simply a remote place, but a human experiment in voluntary isolation.

The dominant sensation when observing the island from the ocean is that of a tiny human presence suspended in absolute nothingness. Here, the contemporary world suddenly seems extremely distant.

The Ultimate Luxury: the Unknown

For decades, global tourism pursued visibility. Today, paradoxically, the true privilege seems to have become the opposite: finding places that have not yet been completely transformed into images.

These remote territories exert a growing fascination precisely because they escape the logic of digital overexposure. They do not promise absolute comfort or standardised experiences. Instead, they offer something far rarer: the authentic sensation of discovery.

In many cases, travelling to these places is difficult, expensive or logistically complicated. But it is precisely this difficulty that preserves their identity. The unknown requires time, patience and a willingness to accept the unexpected.

Perhaps the deepest fascination of these unusual places does not derive solely from their geographical strangeness, but from the fact that they remind us of something fundamental: the planet is still immensely larger than our ability to describe it.

And this awareness, today more than ever, continues to generate wonder.