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The 11 Best Cable-Free Towns That Are Gloriously Hard to Get To

Eleven of the best remote villages to visit where the only way in is a boat, a donkey, or your own two feet. No cars, barely any cables, and that difficulty is exactly the appeal.

I have a soft spot for places that make you work for them. The best remote villages to visit are the ones with no road in — where you arrive by boat, or on a mule, or after a sweaty two-hour walk with your bag cutting into your shoulders, and the second you stop you understand exactly why nobody built a road. The difficulty is the gatekeeper. It keeps these places quiet. Here are eleven that are gloriously hard to get to, ranked by how much the hassle pays off.

A medieval town hidden on the far side of a giant rock island, invisible from the mainland — you walk through a single tunnel gate and the whole stone town unfolds, car-free, on the seaward face. Technically there’s a causeway, so it’s the gentlest entry here, but that tunnel reveal still gives me chills. Stay overnight after the day-trippers leave.

For decades the only ways in were a brutal mountain hike over the pass or a helicopter, until they finally bored a tunnel through. Go anyway — the village of a few dozen souls sits above a waterfall that pours straight off the cliff into the Atlantic. It’s the most dramatic dozen houses you’ll ever see. Wind that’ll knock you sideways. Pack accordingly.

The only place in America where the mail still comes by mule. Home of the Havasupai people at the bottom of a side canyon off the Grand Canyon, reachable by a 13km hike down (or that mule, or a helicopter when it flies). The reward is the turquoise Havasu Falls, which look fake and aren’t. Permits sell out in minutes each year. Set an alarm.

The smallest village in Switzerland, perched in the Verzasca valley with a population you can count on two hands. You can drive near it now but the village itself is a car-free cluster of grey stone rustico houses on a slope so steep the lanes are more like staircases. They turned the whole place into a sort of scattered hotel to keep it alive. Eerie, beautiful, almost empty.

Possibly the most isolated inhabited town in the western Arctic — a scatter of brightly painted houses on the edge of the world’s largest fjord system. You get there by a tiny weekly flight and a helicopter hop, weather permitting (it often isn’t). Polar bears wander in. Sled dogs everywhere. It’s not easy, it’s not cheap, and it’s unlike anywhere on earth.

The “dying town” — a crumbling hilltop village in Lazio connected to the world by a single long pedestrian footbridge, and nothing else. The plateau it sits on is slowly eroding away beneath it, which gives the whole place a poignant, on-borrowed-time feeling. Cross the bridge at dawn before the bus crowds and it’s just you and the cats and the mist below.

A village of two hundred people and (the local boast) far more goats, tucked deep in a side arm of the Sognefjord. For most of its history the only way in was by boat, and arriving on the water past the cliffs to the tiniest stave church in Scandinavia is the way to do it. Buy the brown goat’s cheese. It’s an acquired taste and worth acquiring.

High in the Karakoram, this Wakhi village sat with no road at all until shockingly recently — the only access was a multi-day mountain trek over terrifying terrain. There’s now a rough, hair-raising jeep track, but it’s still one of the most remote inhabited valleys in the world, ringed by 7,000m peaks. Go for the mountains and the famously warm welcome. Not for the faint-hearted.

A hamlet at the head of a spectacular ravine, long reachable only by mule or the legendary gorge hike down to the sea. The walk down the Masca barranco is steep, scrambly, and ends with a boat pickup on a black-sand cove. The village itself clings to the rock like it grew there. The first time I walked out I had to be helped onto the boat. No regrets.

The most remote inhabited island on earth, full stop. No airstrip. The only way there is a six-day boat crossing from South Africa on one of a handful of ships a year. The single settlement has the wonderful name “Edinburgh of the Seven Seas”. A couple of hundred people, a volcano, and the wildest sense of isolation imaginable. Getting there is most of the adventure, honestly.

A volcanic island inside a volcanic island — a tiny crater village of around 150 people in a caldera within a caldera, way out in the Pacific south of Tokyo. The boat only runs when the sea behaves, which is maybe half the time, and the helicopter has a handful of seats that book out instantly. When the swell’s up you simply can’t get on or off, and you wait. Standing on the rim looking down into the inhabited crater at the cluster of roofs and the steaming vents… that’s the most “how is this real” moment I’ve had travelling. The hardest one to reach, and the best. Number one.

So which gloriously awkward town should I attempt first? Civita di Bagnoregio or Monemvasia if you want the magic without the logistical nightmare, Aogashima if you’ve got patience and a flexible return date, and Tristan da Cunha if you genuinely want to fall off the map. The hard ones stay quiet. That, in the end, is the entire reason to go.

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