[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The Towns Built Inside Craters and Volcanoes (And Why People Stay)

Whole communities living in the bowl of a thing that could, theoretically, blow. I went to a few towns inside volcanic craters to ask the obvious question, and the answers surprised me.

Towns inside volcanic craters: who lives there, and are they out of their minds?

Towns inside volcanic craters sound like a thing a fantasy novelist invents and then quietly abandons because it’s too on-the-nose. But they’re real, they’re inhabited, and the people in them are not, as I’d lazily assumed, daredevils with a death wish. They’re farmers. Mostly. With opinions about you asking dumb questions.

I asked one anyway. Standing in a green bowl that was once a screaming hole of magma, I said to a man stacking onions — and I’m paraphrasing his look more than his words — “aren’t you worried?” He shrugged. Pointed at the dirt. The dirt was the answer. It usually is.

Here’s the thing nobody mentions when they’re being dramatic about volcanoes. Volcanic soil is absurdly fertile. Wildly so. All those minerals that came up screaming break down into the kind of dirt that makes a tomato taste like it’s showing off. So if your great-grandparents found a dormant crater with a flat floor and a freshwater spring, you didn’t move out. You planted vines. You stayed. And your kids stayed.

That’s the unglamorous secret of nearly every crater town: it’s an economic decision dressed up as a daredevil one. The volcano isn’t the risk they tolerate. It’s the reason they’re rich enough in soil to bother.

The Bay of Naples is the loud example. Whole towns sit on and around the Campi Flegrei — the “burning fields,” a giant restless caldera that gently rises and falls and occasionally makes the news in a way residents would prefer it didn’t. Pozzuoli is built right on it. People there have a phrase for the slow ground-swelling that cracks their walls, and they say it the way Londoners talk about the Tube being delayed. Tired. Used to it.

And then there’s the wine. The grapes growing on Vesuvius’s flanks make Lacryma Christi — “tears of Christ” — and it is genuinely, properly good. The vines survived 79 AD’s bad day and a few since. You can sip it on a terrace looking up at the cone that buried Pompeii, which is either profound or unhinged, I couldn’t decide.

Now the showstopper. Aogashima is a Japanese island, a few hundred kilometres south of Tokyo, and it’s a volcanic crater with a smaller volcanic crater sitting inside it. A double caldera. About 160-odd people live in the outer ring, growing things, running a tiny school, and using the geothermal steam vents to cook — there’s a communal sauna and a spot where you put food in the ground and the volcano steams it for you.

Getting there is the catch, and it’s a serious one. There’s a helicopter that takes a handful of passengers, or a boat that can only dock when the swell behaves, which is maybe sixty percent of days. I had a friend wait four days for the sea to let her on. Four days. So if Aogashima is on your list, build in slack, alot of it, and don’t book a tight onward flight. The island does not care about your schedule.

But people stay because — and this is the part that got me — it’s theirs. It’s quiet, the stars are obscene, the soil’s good, and everyone knows everyone. The volcano is just the landlord. A grumpy one, sure. But fair, mostly.

The Azores do a gentler version. Sete Cidades on São Miguel sits in a vast green crater with twin lakes, one blue and one green, and there’s a small village living right down on the crater floor, hydrangeas everywhere, cows that look very pleased with themselves. It’s farmed, lived-in, ordinary in the loveliest way. You can walk down into it. You should.

What ties all these places together isn’t bravado. It’s a kind of long memory and a short shrug. The land gave their families a living, the ground occasionally grumbles, and they’ve made peace with the trade because, frankly, the alternative is worse soil somewhere safer and more boring.

And maybe that’s the answer to “why do people stay.” Because the place that could, theoretically, blow is also the place that’s been keeping them fed for two hundred years. You don’t leave that over a maybe. You stack your onions. You pour the volcano wine. You check the alert level, and you get on with it.

Go see one. Eat something cooked by the ground itself. And when you ask a local if they’re scared, be ready for the shrug, because it’s the most honest answer you’ll get all trip.

This article contains affiliate links marked rel="sponsored". We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.