25 Places Where People Really Shouldn’t Live But They Do
Some places on Earth look less like homes and more like challenges — volcanoes that never stop rumbling, towns where the air itself can kill you, settlements so remote that a medical emergency becomes a death sentence. Yet millions of people call these places home, and they wouldn’t trade them for anything.
The idea that a place is “unlivable” is almost always an outsider’s verdict. For the people who actually live there, these locations represent something more complicated: ancestral land, economic survival, cultural identity, or simply the only life they’ve ever known. What looks like reckless stubbornness from the outside often reveals itself, up close, as remarkable ingenuity and human resilience.
This list spans every continent and covers every kind of hazard — from bone-snapping cold and deadly heat to poisoned air, rising floodwaters, and the ever-present threat of volcanic eruption. Each entry explores not just why these places are dangerous or extreme, but why people stay anyway. The answers are often surprising, sometimes heartbreaking, and always deeply human.
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The 25 Most Extreme Places People Still Call Home
1. Oymyakon, Russia
Oymyakon holds the record for the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with a recorded low of -67.7°C (-89.9°F). Located in Russia’s Sakha Republic, this village of roughly 500 people experiences winters so severe that exposed skin can suffer frostbite in under a minute, car engines must run continuously to avoid freezing solid, and burials require bonfires to thaw the permafrost before a grave can be dug.
Despite this, the Yakut people have called this region home for centuries, relying on reindeer herding and horse breeding in one of the most hostile landscapes imaginable. Modern residents continue traditions that have kept their ancestors alive for generations — eating raw, frozen fish and horse meat that preserves naturally in temperatures that make refrigerators redundant. Oymyakon isn’t just survivable; to its residents, it’s simply home.
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2. La Rinconada, Peru
Perched more than 5,100 meters (16,700 feet) above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, La Rinconada is the highest permanent human settlement on Earth. Around 30,000 people live here year-round, battling altitude sickness, sub-zero temperatures, and near-complete lack of oxygen — all to mine gold from the surrounding glaciers.
The mining system operating here is called cachorreo: workers labor for 30 days without pay, then on the 31st day are allowed to take as much ore as they can carry in a single trip. It’s a brutal gamble. To make matters worse, mercury is used to process the gold, and many miners suffer chronic mercury poisoning. No proper sanitation, no reliable healthcare, and no real governance exists here — yet people keep arriving, driven by the dream of striking it rich.
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3. Norilsk, Russia
Norilsk is one of the most polluted cities on the planet, and also one of the most northerly. Built on permafrost inside the Arctic Circle, it experiences temperatures as low as -55°C (-67°F) and is home to roughly 175,000 people. The city sits atop massive nickel deposits, and the smelting operations that process them pump around 2 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere annually — earning the skies above Norilsk a distinctive, toxic reddish hue.
The surrounding landscape is a near-dead zone: trees within a 30-kilometer radius of the smelters have been completely killed by acid rain. Residents suffer higher-than-average rates of respiratory disease, cancer, and shortened life expectancy. Norilsk is a closed city — you need permission to enter. Yet people stay because the nickel industry pays exceptionally well by Russian standards, and for many, the money outweighs the poison.
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4. Dallol, Ethiopia
At an average annual temperature of around 34°C (93°F), Dallol holds the record for the hottest average temperature of any inhabited place on Earth. Located in the Danakil Depression — already 130 meters below sea level — it sits in one of the most geologically active zones in the world, surrounded by active volcanoes, hydrothermal pools of toxic acid, and salt flats that can reach 60°C (140°F) at surface level.
Small communities of Afar nomads have lived in and around this region for centuries, mining salt — one of the most valuable commodities in the pre-modern world — and trading it across the Horn of Africa. Life here is extraordinary in its difficulty, but for the Afar people, the Danakil Depression is their homeland, and the salt trade still sustains families today.
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5. Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine
In April 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing radiation roughly 400 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. More than 350,000 people were permanently evacuated from the surrounding zone. And yet, Chernobyl was never entirely emptied.
A group of elderly women, known as samosely (self-settlers), refused to leave their ancestral homes even after the disaster. At their peak, around 1,200 people had returned to live illegally in the exclusion zone; today, only a handful of elderly residents remain. In addition, hundreds of workers staff the ongoing cleanup operations and the new containment structure, rotating in and out to manage radiation exposure. The zone itself has become an accidental nature reserve, with wolves, lynx, and Przewalski horses thriving in the absence of mass human activity.
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6. Mount Merapi, Indonesia
Nicknamed “Fire Mountain,” Mount Merapi on the island of Java is one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes on Earth. It has erupted roughly 60 times in the last 500 years, most recently causing massive destruction in 2010, when pyroclastic flows killed more than 350 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.
Despite this, over 300,000 people live on and around Merapi’s slopes. The reason is simultaneously simple and profound: volcanic soil is extraordinarily fertile. The same geological forces that produce deadly eruptions also create some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. For communities that have farmed here for generations, the volcano is not just a hazard — it’s the source of their prosperity and part of their cultural and spiritual identity. Leaving means abandoning the land that feeds them.
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7. The Atacama Desert, Chile
The Atacama Desert is the driest non-polar desert on Earth, receiving an average of less than 1 millimeter of rainfall per year. Some weather stations in the Atacama have never recorded rain at all. Surface temperatures can swing by 40°C between day and night, and the UV radiation at altitude is extreme enough to cause rapid sunburn even on cloudy days.
Yet over 1 million people live across the Atacama region, concentrated primarily in mining towns and coastal cities. The desert sits atop the world’s largest known reserves of copper and lithium — two minerals essential to global technology and electric vehicle manufacturing. Towns like Calama exist almost entirely to service the mining operations, and residents have built remarkably functional communities in an environment that seems designed to repel human settlement.
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8. Verkhoyansk, Russia
Founded in 1638, Verkhoyansk is the oldest city north of the Arctic Circle, with a population of around 1,500. It holds the distinction of having one of the greatest temperature ranges of any city on Earth: winters plunge to -67°C (-89°F), while summers can actually reach +37°C (99°F). The Tsarist regime used Verkhoyansk as a place of exile — the cold being considered punishment enough.
Modern residents work primarily in reindeer herding, fishing, and a small service economy. What keeps people here is a combination of history, culture, and a deep-rooted Yakut identity that stretches back generations. Life in Verkhoyansk is extraordinarily challenging, but its residents possess an intimate knowledge of survival in extreme cold that has been passed down for centuries.
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9. La Oroya, Peru
La Oroya is a mining town in the Peruvian Andes that consistently ranks among the most polluted places on Earth. A smelting complex has been operating here since 1922, processing lead, copper, zinc, and other heavy metals. The result: virtually every child living in La Oroya has blood lead levels far exceeding the WHO’s safety threshold — in some studies, 99% of children tested showed dangerous contamination.
The smelter is also the economic engine of the entire town. When ownership and operations have been threatened with shutdown, residents have actually protested in favor of keeping the polluter open — because without it, there are no jobs, no income, and no future for the town. It’s one of the starkest illustrations of how economic desperation can override environmental and health concerns.
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10. Death Valley, California, USA
Death Valley holds the record for the highest reliably recorded air temperature on Earth: 56.7°C (134°F), logged at Furnace Creek on July 10, 1913. Ground surface temperatures can exceed 90°C (194°F). It receives less than 50mm of rainfall annually, and summer heat is lethal without access to water and shelter.
Around 600 people are permanent residents of Death Valley National Park — mostly park service employees, resort workers, and a small number of individuals who simply prefer the extreme solitude and stark beauty of one of the most dramatic landscapes in North America. The valley also hosts the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, whose ancestors have lived here for at least 1,000 years, viewing Death Valley not as a place of death but as a homeland with profound spiritual significance.
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11. Tristan da Cunha, South Atlantic Ocean
Tristan da Cunha is the most remote permanently inhabited archipelago on Earth. Located in the South Atlantic Ocean, the nearest land is St. Helena — 2,437 kilometers (1,514 miles) away. There is no airport. The only way to reach the island is a six-day boat trip from Cape Town, South Africa, and ships make this journey only a handful of times per year.
Around 250 people live on Tristan da Cunha, most of them descended from the original settlers who arrived in the early 19th century. The entire population shares just eight surnames. In 1961, a volcanic eruption forced the complete evacuation of the island; two years later, the residents chose to return rather than remain in the UK, where they had been resettled. That decision — rejecting relative comfort for an isolated rock in the ocean — says everything about the depth of their attachment to the island.
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12. Pitcairn Island, Pacific Ocean
With a population of fewer than 50 people, Pitcairn Island is one of the least-populated jurisdictions on Earth. It is the last British Overseas Territory in the Pacific, with no harbor and no airstrip — supply ships arrive just a few times each year. The residents are primarily descendants of the HMS Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions, who settled the island in 1790.
Life on Pitcairn is intensely communal by necessity. The entire community must cooperate to unload supply ships using longboats through treacherous surf. Internet access, introduced in the early 2000s, has connected the island to the world but has also raised difficult questions: younger generations leave for better opportunities, and the population has been declining for decades. Pitcairn faces an existential crisis — but the people who remain are deeply committed to preserving their unique way of life.
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13. Kifuka, Democratic Republic of Congo
Kifuka, a small village in the eastern mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo, experiences approximately 158 lightning strikes per square kilometer each year — the highest lightning density recorded anywhere on Earth. Thunderstorms roll through almost daily, and lightning deaths in the region are tragically common.
Yet the population of the surrounding area numbers in the thousands, primarily engaged in agriculture in the fertile highland valleys. For the people of Kifuka, the extraordinary lightning risk is simply a fact of life rather than a reason to relocate — particularly when relocation means losing the agricultural land that feeds their families and the community networks that sustain their daily lives.
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14. Lake Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo/Rwanda
Lake Kivu looks beautiful — a deep, clear lake in the Albertine Rift, surrounded by green hills and home to roughly 2 million people living along its shores. Beneath the surface, however, the lake holds a terrifying secret: dissolved in its depths are an estimated 300 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide and 60 cubic kilometers of methane gas.
If a large earthquake, volcanic eruption, or other disturbance were to trigger a “limnic eruption” — a sudden, massive release of these dissolved gases — the results could be catastrophic for the surrounding communities. A similar event at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 killed 1,700 people overnight. The population around Lake Kivu is more than 1,000 times larger. The lake’s shores remain densely populated because people need the fish, the water, and the fertile land, with few viable alternatives in one of the world’s most economically challenged regions.
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15. Linfen, China
Once dubbed “the most polluted city in the world” by the Blacksmith Institute, Linfen sits in China’s Shanxi Province at the heart of the country’s coal country. Particulate matter and sulfur dioxide concentrations in the air have historically been so extreme that residents report their clothes turn black from pollution simply by hanging them outside to dry.
Around 4 million people live in Linfen and its surrounding metropolitan area, their livelihoods tied to coal mining and processing operations that have been running for decades. China has made significant efforts to clean up Linfen since the mid-2000s, and air quality has improved — but the city remains among the most polluted in a country still grappling with the environmental legacy of rapid industrialization.
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16. Flint, Michigan, USA
Flint, Michigan became internationally synonymous with government failure in 2014, when the city’s water supply was switched to the Flint River without proper treatment, exposing roughly 100,000 residents to dangerous levels of lead. Children tested positive for lead poisoning in alarming numbers, and the long-term health consequences for a generation of Flint residents are still unfolding.
Beyond the water crisis, Flint has faced decades of economic decline following the collapse of its auto manufacturing industry. Unemployment, poverty, and crime have gutted the city’s population from a peak of 200,000 to around 80,000 today. Yet a stubborn, passionate community remains — fighting for clean water, reinvestment, and a future that honors the city’s industrial heritage without repeating its worst failures.
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17. Motuo County, China
Motuo County in Tibet, China, was for decades considered one of the last places on Earth without road access — the only county in China unreachable by motor vehicle. Surrounded by the Himalayas and the Hengduan Mountains, the region receives enormous amounts of rainfall that makes landslides and flooding near-constant threats. Entry required crossing rope bridges and navigating mountain passes.
A tunnel road finally reached Motuo in 2010, but access remains extremely difficult and frequently cut off by landslides. Roughly 10,000 people — primarily of the Monpa and Lhoba ethnic groups — live here, maintaining traditions and agricultural practices that have changed little over centuries. For them, Motuo is not a prison of geography; it is a paradise of biodiversity, with rainforests, rare orchids, and some of the most dramatic landscapes in Asia.
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18. Meghalaya, India
Mawsynram, a village in Meghalaya, India, receives an average of 11,872 millimeters (467 inches) of rainfall annually — making it one of the wettest places on Earth. The rain is so constant and so heavy that residents traditionally wear a “knup,” a full-body umbrella made from bamboo and banana leaves, just to move between buildings.
The extraordinary rainfall is the result of moist air rising rapidly off the Bay of Bengal and hitting the southern slopes of the Meghalayan hills. This same moisture also creates lush, biodiverse forests and fertile agricultural land — which is why communities have thrived here for thousands of years despite (or because of) the relentless rain. The Khasi and Jaintia peoples have developed cultural practices, architecture, and agricultural techniques perfectly adapted to a world that never seems to dry out.
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19. Socotra Island, Yemen
Socotra Island, located in the Arabian Sea off the Horn of Africa, is sometimes called the “Galápagos of the Indian Ocean” for its extraordinary biodiversity — over a third of its plant life exists nowhere else on Earth, including the iconic Dragon Blood Trees. But Socotra’s extreme isolation, brutal monsoon seasons (which cut the island off for months at a time), and increasingly precarious position within Yemen’s ongoing civil war make it one of the most challenging places on the planet to live.
Around 60,000 to 70,000 people call Socotra home, primarily fishing and herding communities descended from ancient South Arabian and African peoples. The island’s isolation preserved a unique language, culture, and ecosystem — but that same isolation now makes it desperately difficult to deliver food, medicine, and aid as Yemen’s conflict puts the entire population at risk.
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20. Múli, Faroe Islands
Múli is a tiny hamlet on the island of Borðoy in the Faroe Islands, accessible only by a narrow mountain road that was constructed just a few decades ago. Before the road existed, residents could only reach the outside world by boat. The village sits exposed to the extreme North Atlantic weather — frequent storms, gale-force winds, and a climate that makes agriculture nearly impossible.
At its peak, Múli had a population of around 100 people. Today, only a single family remains, making it effectively a ghost hamlet — yet one with living, breathing residents who are determined to maintain their connection to a place their ancestors settled hundreds of years ago. Their persistence is a microcosm of the broader human tendency to stay rooted, even when every practical argument points toward leaving.
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21. Barrow (Utqiagvik), Alaska, USA
Utqiagvik — formerly known as Barrow — is the northernmost city in the United States, located 515 kilometers (320 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. Average winter temperatures hover around -26°C (-15°F), and the city experiences polar night — 65 consecutive days of darkness — every winter. There are no roads connecting Utqiagvik to the rest of Alaska; everything must be flown or shipped in, making the cost of living extraordinary.
Around 5,000 people live in Utqiagvik, the majority of them Iñupiat Inuit. For the Iñupiat, this is their ancestral homeland, where they have hunted bowhead whales and lived in community for thousands of years. The city blends modern infrastructure with ancient cultural practices — a functioning school system alongside spring whaling camps that have operated for millennia. Oil revenues have brought relative prosperity, but preserving Iñupiat culture and language remains the deeper motivation for staying.
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22. Minqin County, China
Minqin County in Gansu Province, China, faces an almost perfectly constructed environmental catastrophe. Squeezed between the Badain Jaran and Tengger Deserts — which are steadily advancing — the county’s only river has been sucked dry by upstream irrigation and development, leaving less than 60 miles of fertile land. Severe desertification is swallowing the region at an accelerating rate, threatening to merge two massive deserts into one giant mass of sand.
Despite this, a significant population remains in the county, attempting to hold back the desert through tree planting and land reclamation projects — the continuation of China’s ambitious “Green Wall” reforestation initiative. The people of Minqin are not simply victims of a dying land; many are active combatants in a decades-long battle to preserve it, driven by the conviction that their home is worth fighting for.
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23. La Paz, Bolivia
La Paz, Bolivia, sits at an average elevation of around 3,650 meters (11,975 feet) above sea level, making it the world’s highest administrative capital city. New arrivals frequently suffer from soroche — acute altitude sickness — involving headaches, nausea, and shortness of breath that can develop into life-threatening pulmonary edema in severe cases. The thin air makes physical exertion significantly more demanding, and the city’s steep, winding streets make even daily commutes an athletic challenge.
Yet La Paz is home to over 800,000 people, with the wider metropolitan area exceeding 2 million. The Aymara and Quechua peoples who have called this region home for centuries developed physiological adaptations — including larger lung capacity and more efficient oxygen-carrying red blood cells — that allow them to thrive at altitude. La Paz is a fully functioning, politically significant, culturally rich city that proves altitude, like so many other challenges, can be conquered through adaptation.
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24. The Pitcairn Islands Versus East St. Louis, Illinois, USA
At the opposite extreme from remote island isolation, East St. Louis, Illinois, represents one of the most dangerous examples of urban decline in the United States. With a violent crime rate that is consistently among the highest in the country, a poverty rate exceeding 40%, and an infrastructure so deteriorated that basic city services have repeatedly failed, East St. Louis is frequently cited as one of the most difficult urban environments in America.
The city’s collapse followed the same arc as many Rust Belt cities — the departure of heavy industry, white flight in the mid-20th century, and chronic underinvestment — but the scale of East St. Louis’s decline is particularly severe. Around 19,000 people still live here, primarily lower-income African American residents who lack the financial resources to leave, but also community organizers, local families, and longtime residents who are fighting for revitalization. Their stories of resilience and community activism deserve far more attention than the statistics alone suggest.
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25. Vostok Station, Antarctica
Vostok Station, operated by Russia in the interior of Antarctica, recorded the lowest natural temperature ever measured on Earth’s surface: -89.2°C (-128.6°F) on July 21, 1983. Located nearly 3,500 meters above sea level on the Antarctic plateau, it is one of the most isolated places on the planet — resupply is possible only during a few months of the Antarctic summer, and winter-over crew members are completely cut off from the outside world for months at a time.
Despite conditions that exceed even the most hostile Arctic environments, Vostok Station maintains a year-round crew of Russian scientists conducting glaciological, meteorological, and geophysical research. In 2012, the team drilled through nearly 3.8 kilometers of ice to reach Lake Vostok — a subglacial lake untouched for an estimated 15 million years. The people who winter over at Vostok Station don’t stay because they have to; they stay because they’re pursuing knowledge in a place that has given science some of its most extraordinary discoveries.
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What These Places Teach Us About Human Resilience
Looking at these 25 locations together, several powerful themes emerge. Economic necessity drives people to places like La Rinconada and Norilsk, where the financial rewards of dangerous, isolated work outweigh the risks — at least in the calculation of people who have few alternatives. Cultural and ancestral ties keep communities in Utqiagvik, Socotra, and Tristan da Cunha long after the “rational” choice would be relocation. And scientific mission brings people to places like Vostok Station where human presence is almost entirely a matter of intellectual pursuit.
What unites all 25 is the fundamental human capacity to adapt — to look at a landscape that seems designed to kill you, and figure out not just how to survive there, but how to build a community, maintain traditions, and find meaning in a place that the rest of the world might dismiss as unlivable.
The label “shouldn’t live there” always carries an implicit assumption: that the speaker knows better than the people actually living in these places. More often than not, the opposite is true. The residents of Oymyakon know their winter. The Afar nomads of the Danakil Depression know their salt. The Iñupiat of Utqiagvik know their ice. What looks like reckless persistence from the outside is, from the inside, a deep and intimate relationship with place — one that has been built over generations and that no outsider can fully appreciate from a distance.
These places remind us that “livable” is not an objective category but a deeply personal one, shaped by history, culture, necessity, and the particular human ability to find home in the most improbable of places.
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FAQ
What is the most dangerous place people still live in?
It depends on the type of danger. La Rinconada, Peru, combines extreme altitude, mercury poisoning, and economic exploitation, making it one of the most hazardous permanent settlements on Earth. Lake Kivu’s shores present perhaps the greatest single catastrophic risk, with a potential limnic eruption capable of killing millions. Norilsk, Russia, may pose the greatest long-term chronic health risk due to its extreme air pollution.
What is the coldest place where people permanently live?
Oymyakon, Russia, holds the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded in a permanently inhabited settlement: -67.7°C (-89.9°F). Around 500 people live there year-round, making it the coldest inhabited community on Earth.
Why do people continue to live near active volcanoes?
The primary reason is agricultural productivity. Volcanic soil is extraordinarily fertile, producing abundant crops that have sustained communities for generations. Cultural attachment, economic investment, and a degree of fatalism about risks that may not materialize for decades also play significant roles, as seen in communities around Mount Merapi in Indonesia.
What makes La Rinconada, Peru, so extreme?
La Rinconada sits at over 5,100 meters above sea level — the highest permanent human settlement on Earth. Residents face altitude sickness, extreme cold, no formal sanitation, no reliable healthcare, and chronic mercury poisoning from gold processing. The exploitative cachorreo labor system means many miners work 30 days without guaranteed pay, gambling on the 31st-day ore collection.
Are there places people are forced to live that they can’t leave?
Many residents of extremely challenging locations face structural barriers to leaving — including lack of financial resources, absence of job opportunities elsewhere, and the loss of community support networks that relocation would require. East St. Louis and Flint, Michigan, are examples where many residents would prefer to leave but lack the means, while places like Norilsk create economic dependency that effectively traps workers in a polluted environment.
Has anyone ever chosen to return to an evacuated dangerous zone?
Yes — most famously, the samosely of Chernobyl, who returned illegally to the exclusion zone after the 1986 nuclear disaster and remained until natural attrition reduced their numbers to a handful. The residents of Tristan da Cunha also chose to return to their remote volcanic island in 1963 after being evacuated to the UK, demonstrating that deep attachment to place can outweigh even the most dramatic safety concerns.
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The Bottom Line
From the frozen silence of Oymyakon to the toxic skies of Norilsk, from the lightning-charged highlands of the Congo to the gas-laden depths of Lake Kivu, these 25 places represent the full spectrum of environmental, geographic, and social extremes that humans continue to navigate every single day. The people who live in them are not irrational, reckless, or uninformed — they are adapted, resilient, and deeply connected to the places they inhabit.
The real lesson of this list, assembled with the spirit of curiosity that drives platforms like List25, is that human geography is far stranger and more wonderful than any purely rational calculus would predict. People live where they live for reasons that go far deeper than safety statistics and climate data — reasons rooted in identity, memory, community, and the ancient, stubborn human insistence on calling a place home.