Imagine a town where the police office and almost every home share one building. Or one where the mayor, the librarian and the bartender are the same person, because she is the only resident. Both are real.
The world’s strangest towns aren’t film sets or theme parks. People live, work and pay their bills in them. Some dug underground to escape the heat. Others built their houses under a cliff, or ended up with more graves than neighbours. Here are six you can actually visit, and what makes each one so odd.
Strangest towns that hide from the weather
Coober Pedy, Australia: the town that lives underground
Deep in the outback of South Australia, about 846 km (526 miles) north of Adelaide, summer temperatures often climb above 40°C (104°F). So in Coober Pedy, about half the residents live underground.
Their homes, called dugouts, are carved into the hillsides. Above ground the desert bakes, but inside a dugout the temperature stays at a comfortable 24°C (75°F) all year. No air conditioning needed.
The town exists because of opal. A teenage boy found the first stones here in 1915, and today Coober Pedy supplies most of the world’s gem-quality opal. Visitors can sleep in underground motels, pray in underground churches and play golf at night with glowing balls to dodge the daytime heat. The course has no grass, so golfers carry a small square of turf to tee off from.
The bare, rocky landscape looks so otherworldly that it has stood in for other planets in films such as Pitch Black and Red Planet.
Setenil de las Bodegas, Spain: the town under a rock
In the hills of Andalusia, northwest of Ronda, the white village of Setenil de las Bodegas didn’t fight its cliffs. It moved in underneath them. Houses, bars and shops are built straight into the rock overhangs of a river gorge, so a giant slab of stone forms their roof.
The two most famous streets are named for the light. On Cuevas del Sol (Caves of the Sun), the overhang sits above sunny café terraces. Across the river, on Cuevas de la Sombra (Caves of the Shade), the rock covers the whole street like a tunnel and keeps it cool in the scorching Spanish summer.
According to local legend, the name comes from the Latin septem nihil, “seven times nothing”, for the sieges the town fought off. It finally fell in 1484.
Strangest towns with unusual rules
Whittier, Alaska: a whole town under one roof
Almost all of Whittier’s 272 residents live in a single 14-storey building, Begich Towers. It was built by the US Army in 1957, and today it holds homes, local services and even a one-room police office. A tunnel once led straight to the school, so children could get to class without going outside.
That matters here. Whittier gets around 5,000 mm (197 inches) of rain and snow a year.
Getting in is just as odd. The only road into town runs through a 4.1 km (2.5-mile) tunnel with one lane, shared by cars and trains. Traffic takes turns, changing direction every half hour, and the tunnel closes at night. Miss the last opening and you’re staying the night, whichever side you’re on.
Longyearbyen, Norway: the town where you’re told not to die
On the Arctic islands of Svalbard, Longyearbyen is one of the northernmost towns on Earth. It’s famous for a rule that isn’t quite a rule: you’re not allowed to die there.
The truth is stranger. In 1950, the town stopped normal burials after finding that bodies of people who died in the 1918 flu pandemic hadn’t decomposed in the frozen ground. Today only ashes can be buried, with permission, and seriously ill residents are flown to mainland Norway. Pregnant women usually leave a few weeks before their due date, too, as the local hospital is small.
Cats can’t be brought to Svalbard, to protect its wildlife. Anyone heading out of town must carry a way to scare off polar bears, and many carry a rifle. And if you’re reading this in November, the sun won’t rise over Longyearbyen until mid-February.
Strangest towns where the numbers don’t add up
Monowi, Nebraska: population one
When the 2010 US census came to Monowi, it counted exactly one person: Elsie Eiler. Her husband Rudy had died in 2004, leaving her as the only resident of a town that once had more than 100 people.
So Elsie runs everything. She is the mayor, clerk, treasurer and librarian. Each year she issues herself a liquor licence for the Monowi Tavern, the bar her family has owned since 1971. She also looks after Rudy’s Library, about 5,000 books he left behind.
Guinness World Records lists Monowi as the town with the lowest population. Elsie, now in her nineties, has welcomed visitors from all 50 US states and more than 60 countries. As she told Guinness, “The bar is the town, and I’m the town.”
Colma, California: where the dead outnumber the living
Just south of San Francisco lies a town of about 1,500 people and an estimated 1.5 million dead. That’s nearly 1,000 dead for every living resident.
Colma became a cemetery town because its big neighbour ran out of room. In 1900, San Francisco banned new burials, and in 1912 it ordered most of its old cemeteries out of the city. Many of the bodies ended up in Colma. Today 17 cemeteries cover about three-quarters of its land, and famous residents include the Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp and Levi Strauss of jeans fame.
Locals take it with good humour. The town’s unofficial motto is “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”
So, which strange town would you move to?
Most of these towns began with a practical problem: desert heat, Arctic cold, a wartime port or a city running out of room. The solutions just happened to be wonderfully weird.
Would you rather live underground, under a rock or in a building with your whole town? Tell us in the comments.
If you enjoyed these, explore the weird borders you can actually visit, or discover 12 real places that look like they were lifted from a fairytale. And pin this one for your next offbeat adventure.