Life on the World's Most Remote Inhabited Island
Rough weather and no airport, but lots of community (and lobsters)
Seven family names cover nearly everyone. One school. One grocery store, where you place orders months ahead and hope the supplies arrive on schedule. One hospital. No airport. And if you want to leave, you’ll have to catch one of the roughly nine ships that visit each year.
Welcome to Tristan da Cunha, a tiny island in the South Atlantic, roughly midway between South Africa and South America. It’s often described as the world’s most remote inhabited island.
Tristan is essentially all volcano — a steep green cone, Queen Mary’s Peak, rises nearly 6,700 feet straight out of the sea and is usually wrapped in clouds. The island is barely 38 square miles, almost all of it mountain, which leaves only a thin parcel of flat land at the water’s edge. There, a couple of hundred people are gathered into one village: Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, or just “the Settlement” — a set of low, houses built to withstand strong winds that constitute the whole of inhabited Tristan. The weather is cool, around 60°F year-round, gray and wet and windy.
To the outside world, it sounds less like a place to live than like the setting of a reality TV survival show. And yet the roughly 220 people who call Tristan home don’t merely tolerate life there. By all accounts, they love it.
Spend a few minutes watching TikTok videos posted by island resident Kelly Green, and you’ll begin to understand why. Green, a mother of two who also runs Tristan’s tourism and heritage department, documents daily life on the island for more than 144,000 followers. Her videos show a life that can look impossibly difficult by modern standards: long waits for necessities, few shops, limited travel, and a population so small that everyone knows everyone else’s business.
But they also reveal something many of us yearn for: a deep sense of community, belonging, and contentment.
Take the “potato patches,” the communal farming plots that have helped sustain Tristan’s families for generations. In one video, Green films islanders digging up potatoes while someone gives a brief history about how the “humble hero” (potato) has been an integral part of the island’s life. The scene looks less like farm chores and more like a family gathering.
That sense of belonging may help explain one of the most extraordinary decisions in modern history. In 1961, when a volcanic eruption forced the evacuation of all 264 residents to Britain, the islanders suddenly found themselves with access to modern amenities, shopping, jobs, and conveniences they had never known.
Yet within two years, most chose to return to one of the most isolated places on earth. Most families were home by late 1963, led by island council head Willie Repetto. Repetto explained their desire to return this way: “In England it’s money, money, money, worry, worry, worry, all the time,” he said. “If you have no job and no money it is difficult to live. In Tristan every man has his job and he grows his own food.”
More than six decades later, that choice still puzzles outsiders. Scroll through the comments on Green’s social media, and you’ll find commenters who declare that life has to be “absolutely miserable” out there. Many of them ask: Why would anyone live there? Isn’t it unfair to raise children in such isolation?
But the better question might be: How did this community come to exist in the first place?
A 16th century discovery
The island was discovered in 1506 by the Portuguese explorer Tristão da Cunha, who was leading a fleet around the Cape of Good Hope en route to India. Rough seas kept him from landing, but he gave the island his name — which means the man who lent his name to the world’s most remote inhabited island never actually set foot on it.
For centuries, Tristan stayed empty. But Britain became interested in the island because of Napoleon.
In 1816, with Napoleon Bonaparte exiled to St. Helena (which is about 1,500 miles away from Tristan), Britain worried the French might use Tristan as a staging point for a rescue. So it annexed the island and stationed a garrison of soldiers there. When the garrison withdrew the next year, most soldiers left. A few stayed on — among them William Glass, a Scottish corporal, who remained with his wife, their two children, and two English stonemasons. They drew up a founding agreement called the “the firm” which laid the foundation of a shared labor system: “equal shares of stock and stores; equally divided profit; equal shares in paying for purchases; no one superior over another.”
Some of Glass’s ideas have survived to the present. Land is held communally, and rules limit how much livestock each family can keep — partly to protect scarce grazing, partly to keep large inequalities from taking root.
But who actually lives on the island today — and governs?
Most people living on Tristan were born there, though they do have British citizenship since Tristan is a British overseas territory. Immigration is effectively closed unless you already have family ties to the island, as some do in South Africa and Britain. The few outsiders are contract workers hired by the local government — including a doctor, teachers, an agricultural adviser, and conservation specialists — who rotate through on fixed-term assignments that typically last about two years.
The island is governed by the 11-member Island Council — eight elected and three appointed, led by a UK-appointed administrator who lives on the island as the British government’s resident representative and oversees the territory’s day-to-day administration. One of the elected members serves as Chief Islander, chosen in a separate vote.
Daily life
One of the biggest misconceptions about Tristan is that life there is slow. In fact, NPR recently called it “the busiest place you’ve never seen.” With so few residents, nearly everyone ends up wearing several hats.
The island’s economy revolves around one thing: lobster. Tristan’s prized rock lobster is caught in the rough waters offshore and exported worldwide, and it’s the community’s main source of income. Lobstering season typically runs from July through April. On a good day during the season, the boats can land five metric tons.
But while lobster is the backbone of the economy, islanders have other professions too. Many residents work for the island’s small government as teachers, nurses, administrators, conservation officers, or mechanics. Others farm, fish, knit, repair machinery, or manage tourism — often several of these at once. For food — besides potatoes — families grow pumpkins and raise sheep, cattle, chickens, and ducks. A three-mile stretch of road runs from the settlement to the potato patches, served by what may be the world’s most remote scheduled bus route.
And when the work is done, life on Tristan turns social. Birthdays, christenings, and holidays are community-wide affairs. One child celebrating a first birthday recently had 25 godparents at their celebration. People meet at the Café da Cunha or Albatross Bar, go on hikes, and gather for community events like outdoor picnics. Sometimes, islanders even make videos responding to outsiders’ questions — whether they are genuinely curious or negative. One such video shows children and adults simply having fun outdoors together. Neighbors drop by without invitations. Evenings are often spent “visiting” — turning up at someone’s house for food, drink, and conversation. The front door, quite literally, stays open.
Despite the isolation, the island does have some modern conveniences, including the internet. For years it was so limited that residents joked about scheduling their online lives around the hours the connection was on. Then, in September 2024, the satellite internet broadband service Starlink arrived, giving islanders more reliable and speedier access.
But there’s still no airport, and never will be, because of the island’s geography. To visit, you’ll spend close to a week crossing the South Atlantic by ship from Cape Town, South Africa, which is about 1,750 miles away. And because there’s no deep-water harbor, passengers and cargo can’t simply walk ashore — they transfer to smaller boats to reach land. Fresh fruit vanishes from the shop almost as soon as a ship arrives. New cars and furniture come off by crane.
And if someone gets seriously ill? Tristan’s small Camogli Healthcare Centre handles routine care, minor surgeries, and some emergencies, but isn’t equipped to treat complex medical cases. Major health issues mean waiting for the next ship and a roughly six-day sail to Cape Town — there is nothing within helicopter range and the nearest airport is more than 1,500 miles away. This May, with a patient in critical condition and oxygen running low, Britain didn’t extract the patient — it parachuted a doctor, an intensive care nurse, and supplies onto the island, and later sent a Royal Navy ship to collect the team.
The island also doesn’t offer opportunities for higher education, so many young islanders leave for South Africa or the United Kingdom to attend college and pursue careers they might not be able to find at home.
It’s tempting to romanticize life on the world’s most remote inhabited island, but Tristan has real hardships: isolation, rough weather, limited opportunities, and the knowledge that leaving — or getting help in a crisis — means a long ocean voyage.
But read enough about the place — or watch islanders collect eggs, harvest potatoes, and get ready for another community celebration — and the real mystery may not be why anyone chose to go back.
It may be why the rest of us cannot have the same sense of contentment and belonging in our own communities.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m sort of an armchair traveler so I’ll need to check out the videos. I’m always happy when I hear of interesting places that people just love to continue living in.
Fun article to read. I bet even most geography nerds learn a lot from this little article.