From castles positioned on crumbling cliffs, to apartment blocks in toxic wastelands, join me as we check out the scariest cities built on the edge of the Earth! With each city we’ll be raising the stakes, as each one grows more and more precarious.
Makoko, Nigeria
Living by the ocean sounds pretty fun. But in some places, life on the water can be downright dangerous. On the very edge of Lagos is a partially floating community called Makoko that consists of six separate villages making up a gigantic slum.
Four of them are based on the water of the Lagos Lagoon on the east coast, and most of the structures here are built on strong stilts, which keep them from collapsing into the dirty and polluted water. This community is squashed together, with population estimates of up to 250,000-people.
Drone flight over Makoko 'slum' in Lagos by Editi Effiong You have to navigate the slum on canoe and survive with little electricity and sanitation. Furthermore, the residents are particularly vulnerable to disease and the slum faces incredibly high levels of maternal mortality in childbirth. But residents there have made the most of their watery home. The settlement has several general stores, churches and a motel. It even used to be home to the Makoko Floating School, which was held up by recycled plastic barrels that float on the water, and a triangular roof which kept the structure balanced.
But this way of life is under threat. In recent years Lagos has seen increasingly intense floods and rains that pose a threat to the whole city. Makoko’s location on the water makes it particularly vulnerable, and there’s dangers that rising sea-levels caused by climate-change will sink the entire slum into the ocean! Several buildings like the floating school have already collapsed, and in future decades the whole of Makoko might fade away forever, meaning it’s literally on the current edge of the Earth. There’s something eerily scary about knowing your city will eventually be sunk by the sea. Mother nature is a cruel mistress sometimes.
Yanjin, China
Makoko isn’t the only community that was built in a life-threatening location. We usually think of a city as a great sprawling metropolis, with loads of buildings and bustling streets spread out over different neighborhoods. Yet Yanjin, in China’s Yunnan Province, is a busy city that’s incredibly compact, because the entire thing runs along the banks of the Heng river.
Trying to fit an entire city on a handful of long, winding roads sounds crazy! But, incredibly, Yanjin has 450,000 residents, which for context, beats the population of American cities like Orlando, New Orleans and Honolulu! The residents are jam-packed in tall buildings along a stretch of just 3-miles, which sounds like a claustrophobic nightmare. But to make matters worse, the buildings also sit at the bottom of the steep Heng River valley, with cliffs rising sharply above them.
Yanjin County by Visit China
The gap between the river and cliff-side is just 100ft wide in some places, making Yanjin the narrowest city in the world! But the residents face danger from both sides, as they’re constantly threatened by landslides and floods. In 2006, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake hit the larger Yanjin County, causing rocks from the cliffs to rain down on the city. Dozens were injured and at least 17-residents lost their lives, so since, timber and reinforced concrete has been used in construction to strengthen the buildings. But the city also succumbs to floods almost every year; as the Heng River rises and bursts its banks. Many of the buildings are built on strong, stilt-like columns, which defend them from rising water-levels. But according to one resident, the flooding causes major accidents and injuries on a yearly basis.
So while the city looks beautiful, it sounds absolutely terrifying to live that close to the unpredictable river and the crumbling cliffs above. Talk about double-trouble!
Civita Di Bagnoregio, Italy
High above Italy’s Lazio region, sits Civita di Bagnoregio, a medieval town from the 7th century BCE that’s built on top of volcanic rock. At an elevation of over 1,400ft, the city literally rises above the clouds, and it’s only accessible on-foot via a 980ft-long bridge!
Previously, you had to travel up a series of steep, cliff-side paths on a donkey, to a main gateway that was accessed through a tunnel carved into the rock. But due to continuous landslides over the ages, the modern foot-bridge was built in 1965.Still, although the route into town isn’t as treacherous as it used to be, living there is still incredibly dangerous. The top layer of the hill is composed of soft rock made from volcanic ash called tuff, that’s incredibly susceptible to erosion. So, centuries of rainfall has caused landslides that have slowly eaten at Bagnoregio, and experts believe that the entire town is now just a third of its original size.
The entire plateau is in constant danger of a total collapse, and because it lies on such shaky ground, Bagnoregio is known as "la citte che muore," which translates to the dying town. It’s widely acknowledged that one day the city will crumble entirely. But a population of 12-residents still call it home, and as it’s a UNESCO world-heritage site; up to a million people visit the city every year! But sadly, scientists say nothing can prevent it’s inevitable collapse, marking it down as a soon-to-be lost edge of the earth, that will one day die completely!
Aogashima, Japan
On the topic of death, a city inside a volcano sounds pretty fantastical, right? Like something out of a scary storybook? While Aogashima village isn’t technically a city, the Japanese hamlet is located on an active volcano over 220-miles from the capital Tokyo.
Aogashima’s crater has a circumference of 3.3 miles, and incredibly it houses the village’s 200-residents, and another, smaller active volcano called Maruyama. The locals are pretty much cut-off from the rest of the world, because there’s no internet connection or phone signal on the island!
In fact, on the 2.3-square-miles of land, only one store, three bars and one post-office fulfils the needs of its residents, and if either of the nearby volcanoes do erupt they’re all pretty screwed. If an ash cloud chases you here, there’s nowhere to run away to, and Aogashima has had temperature-tantrums before. It last erupted in 1785, and it took around 140-lives, which halved the island’s population at the time.
Even today, there’s no airport, so to escape and get to the nearest landmass, you’d have to make the three-hour, 50-mile journey from Aogashima to Hachijojima by boat. So, while this luscious oasis may be some people’s idea of paradise, the feeling of being trapped on a deadly island like this makes my skin crawl. I’m happy to risk sunburn while on vacation, but getting burnt alive by lava is a step too far!
Norilsk, Russia
Picture a place where the danger isn't just from the earth beneath you, but the freezing air above. Norilsk is an incredibly isolated city in Russia, lying 250-miles north of the Arctic circle. In winter, temperatures reach an average low of -23.8 degrees Fahrenheit, but the cold isn’t the only thing that makes it inhospitable, because its air also holds toxic levels of pollution.
The Extreme North of Russia - Norilsk (-40 C°) by RTGuide Norilsk was built in the 1920s over rich deposits of metals like nickel, copper and cobalt. So, a number of mines and metallurgical factories were set up in the mid-1930s. They were constructed by gulag labor-camp workers, and the city soon became home to the largest heavy metal ore smelting complex in the world. But, the process of burning these ores to extract the metal releases the highly acidic and corrosive gas sulphur dioxide, which pollutes the air and causes smog, acid rain and poisonous clouds that suffocate you as you walk by them. Soon, Norilsk faced the worst sulphur dioxide pollution in the world, and by the 1980s all the nearby trees had died, due to sulphur dioxide disrupting the photosynthesis process plants need to survive.
But it’s not just the flora that suffers. Incredibly, 174,000 people live in Norilsk, and they’re constantly affected by respiratory diseases and skin conditions from the pollution. The life expectancy in the city is just 60-years of age, a stark contrast from Russia’s average life-expectancy of 73. Breathing the air can cause pneumonia and just walking around in it can sting your eyes, so, since 2001, Norilsk has been a partially closed city, and outsiders aren’t even allowed to enter without special permits from the Russian government. Furthermore, there are no roads to Norilsk, so it can only be accessed by plane or boat, and it didn’t have any internet access until 2017, meaning it’s residents have been completely isolated from the outside world!
So why would anyone want to live there? Well, lots of the locals are used to this way of life, and the city’s mining and metallurgy jobs offer salaries that are reportedly 2-3 times higher than the rest of Russia. I’m sure that’s tempting for some, but you could give me the largest sum of money in the world, and I wouldn’t want to die from sulphur-poisoning before I’ve reached retirement age!
Iquitos, Peru
Journeying to the edges of the earth through the jungle calls for a lot of planning, and a pack stocked with sunscreen, bug-spray and machetes. But Iquitos in Peru is one of the only cities that requires a similar amount of thought for tourists because it lies in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
Located 2,300-miles from the Atlantic Ocean and 640-miles from Peru’s capital Lima, Iquitos is the largest city in the world that can’t be reached by road, and the only way to get there is an airplane or 5-day boat trip. It sits just 78-miles downstream of the two main tributaries of the Amazon river, so the location couldn’t be wilder. But around half-a-million people live in Iquitos, and the bustling city is complete with museums, a cathedral and modern streets.Still, rainforest-life lingers in the background. The city’s infamous markets stock meat from alligators, leopards, sloths, and other products from exotic creatures for sale. Furthermore, by the Italya river you’ll find Lower Belen, a neighborhood hosting homes and markets made of wood, palm-leaves and corrugated iron.
From December to May, the rainy season raises the water-levels and floods the river here, transforming the shantytown into an Amazonian Venice. As a result, its buildings sit on stilts so it can continue to function like a regular neighborhood, with shops and hospitals that are accessed by canoe.
This must be second nature to Belen’s 7,500-residents, but god knows I’d be scared stiff of the creatures hiding in the water. Still, if this isn’t wild enough for you, lots of companies in Iquitos offer expeditions deeper into the rainforest from the city’s port, allowing you to venture into the heart of the jungle and leave civilization behind.
Meteora, Greece
From Amazon swamp to mountain heights, the ancient monasteries of Thessaly, Greece are designed to separate their monks from society, and they’re about as close to Heaven as you can get. These religious buildings are situated on giant columns of rock known as the Meteora, ranging from 1,000-1,800ft tall. Talk about high praise!
But why are there a bunch of monasteries here in the first place? Well, worship on top of natural columns dates back to Europe and Asia in the 5th Century AD, when Christian monks known as Stylites, would live atop pillars full-time. They believed that by becoming hermits, they’d avoid the earthly temptations on the ground below, and this would allow them to achieve the spiritual salvation of their souls. At
Meteora, Orthodox Christian monks started moving in and settling down around the 11th century AD, with 24 monasteries to choose from at the height of its popularity. As you can imagine, before the invention of U-Haul, shifting building materials and the monk’s belongings to the top was pretty difficult. But the monks got it done by inserting beams into the rock, before using nets and rope ladders to ferry supplies up the columns. Surprisingly, around 50 nuns and 17 monks still live in isolation within the 6 remaining active monasteries, although they’re much more likely to be disturbed by curious tourists who scale the Meteora with modern cable cars that have been installed for easier access.
Meteora, Greece - Varlaam monastery by goran2003 But the monks aren’t allowed to use them to pop down to the local Mickey D’s when they get hungry, and they usually have to rely on visitors to send up food, water and clothing to help them survive. Plus, they’re constantly exposed to bad weather and high winds which threaten to blow them off the columns entirely!
Amedi, Iraq
The city of Amedi in northern Iraq has a prime position on a mountain plateau over 1,400ft high, and its elevation and high walls have made it a great stronghold against invaders. Its 3,000-year history makes it one of the oldest cities in the world, and it was originally only accessible with two staircases, that led to heavily-fortified gates.
Nowadays it isn’t much easier to reach, as you can only approach by car on a single, winding mountain road. Just imagine getting into a traffic jam on this high-risk highway!
It's no surprise that the first society that established Amedi was likely military-based, founded sometime in the 9th century BCE under the Assyrian Empire. But over time, the city has been occupied by several empires, including the Parthians and Persians, swapping hands whenever opposing armies have managed to break through its walls and take it over with brutal force.
As a military hotspot, the city has always been a pretty scary place to live. But today, it’s a part of Iraq, and it has a population of around 11,000 people, squashed into a space that’s just under 0.4 square miles. Unfortunately, the city can’t expand outwards due to its unique location, so despite being around for 3,000 years it hasn’t been able to develop into a larger modern city. You could say that the population has reached a plateau. To be honest though, that’s probably for the best. Living in those ancient, cliff-side houses already looks terrifying and claustrophobic, so just imagine that space covered in skyscrapers and apartment blocks! It’d definitely ruin the city’s natural beauty and give anyone a fear of heights!
Cappadocia, Turkey
Let’s get away from all that vertigo and move onto claustrophobia, as we head underground. Unless you’re a rabbit, living in a hole in the ground probably doesn’t sound very appealing. But in the ancient Cappadocia region of Turkey, people have lived in carved-out-caverns under the surface for thousands of years. Anatolia is a peninsula situated on a plateau north of the Taurus Mountains, and it’s famous for its tall spires of rock that are affectionately known as fairy-chimneys.
This alien landscape was formed around 14-million-years ago, when volcanic eruptions ejected ash over the area, which then solidified into soft tuff. Then, more eruptions coated the tuff in lava, which consolidated into a layer of hard basalt rock. As wind and rain ate away at the ground over millions of years, the tuff began to erode. But because basalt is slower to erode, the areas topped with the harder rock remained, creating pillars with mushroom-like basalt caps! Some of these giant pillars are an impressive 130ft tall, and unbelievably, some people have set up homes inside them! The area is believed to have been inhabited since 1,200BCE, when it was ruled by an ancient civilization called the Hittites. They dug out homes in the fairy-chimneys, and when they came under attack, they started digging tunnels and caves in the ground underneath them to hide from invaders. Over thousands of years, different civilizations expanded on these tunnels, including early Christians, who used them to escape capture by the Romans in the 1st-century AD. This resulted in the creation of a giant, manmade cave network called Derinkuyu, that is 11-levels deep, with 600-entrances and room for up to 20,000 people.
As the underground-city was built, each civilizations also carved new homes, stables and monasteries into the fairy-chimneys on the surface, that were directly connected to the tunnels below. But unlike the long-abandoned cave system, these homes are still populated by some of Cappadocia’s modern inhabitants. The ancient structures contain hand-carved rooms that measure up to 14ft-wide and 10ft-high, resulting in pretty sizable homes. Furthermore,
large hotels and restaurants also exist inside some cave areas, with all the mod-cons needed for contemporary life!
Experience modern cave dwelling in Cappadocia's cave hotels by Rappler Today, the structures are UNESCO protected sites, and carving out more of the rock is prohibited. So extending your cave-house is a big no-no, but you can buy yourself a property in an ancient fairy-chimney and live just like the Hittites thousands of years ago. I just wonder what the real-estate situation is like. Does a cave-room with more holes fetch higher prices? Or is the cave at the highest peak considered a luxury penthouse? Regardless, living in the chimneys can actually be pretty dangerous. Climbing up hundreds of stone steps to get home is a freaky prospect. Furthermore, the volcanic tuff in the area is still eroding over time, and in 2024 an uninhabited fairy-chimney completely collapsed, destroying the home inside it. So from slippery steps to collapsing ceilings, life there can be pretty scary, and I’d hold off moving for now!
Castelfollit De La Roca, Spain
Castelfollit de la Roca is a striking city that sits 164ft high on a narrow cliff in Girona, Catalonia. The buildings feel dangerously close to the cliffside, and at around half-a-square-mile in width, getting from one side of this compact city to the other is like a tightrope-walk. Talk about being caught between la roca and a hard place!
The cliff itself is made from volcanic rock, and it was slowly eroded into a ridge by the Fluvià and Toronell rivers that run on either side of the formation. The city itself is believed to have been built between the 11th-13th centuries, and the majority of the medieval houses are made out of volcanic rock dug-up from the cliff-side.
But around 1,000-people still inhabit the heavy-metal homes, and de la Roca has become affectionately known as the Hanging-town, due to its precarious location. Just imagine trying to navigate this neighborhood after a night of drinking!
Tragically, the ridge is still being eroded by the elements, and in recent years the area has become more prone to rockfalls that eat away at the town. Eventually, this may put those hanging houses in danger, and it’s believed that one day the entire town will collapse and fall off the earth as we know it. So, it’s likely that in the future Castelfollit de la Roca will disappear, and the hanging-town is truly hanging on by a thread!
St Helena
Reaching Castelfollit is a trek but it isn’t nearly as isolated as this next island, that was actually used by the British government to exile their prisoners and make them vanish from society! St Helena lies 1,200-miles away from Africa and the closest landmass is Ascension Island; 807-miles away. Its largest city is Jamestown, and its 629-residents all live inside a beautiful valley between two steep cliffs on the precipice of the island.
This cramped space is just 47-square-miles in total, making it roughly the same size as Disneyworld Orlando, which sounds pretty claustrophobic! If I can’t handle the crowds at Disney, I’m not sure I could handle living in this city, especially as it’s composed of just one main street!
On the Western side of the valley sits Jacob’s Ladder, a 699-step staircase that allows you to climb to an elevation of 600ft and look down at the city below. The ascent is terrifying, and whilst you’re up there, you can see for yourself just how isolated the tiny island is, with nothing but blue ocean stretching into the distance!
For context, the island’s airport was only built in 2015, and currently, the only route there is a weekly 6-hour flight from Johannesburg, South Africa. So, flying from a further-flung part of the world like the US will take well over 24-hours, with multiple plane transfers, and a price tag of between 3,000-$10,000! That dent in your wallet is scary enough on its own, but prior to the airport’s construction, the only way to access the island was a treacherous boat trip from South Africa, which could take up to 5-days. So, Jamestown truly sits on the edge of the earth, and after the city was built by the British in 1659 its big claim-to-fame was the imprisonment of the French General Napoleon Bonaparte. He was captured and exiled to the city after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, before living the last 6-years of his life in isolation elsewhere on Saint Helena. But old Nappy isn’t alone, and the British Empire actually exiled several prisoners on the island over the years, as its remote location would completely remove them from society. So, while lots of people comfortably live in Jamestown today, I can’t imagine anything scarier than being stranded there in the 1800s, forced to live thousands of miles away from the rest of civilization.
Furong Town, China
Most cities are known for their famous buildings, monuments and landmarks. But some places boast more frightening attractions, like giant waterfalls churning through the city-center. Furong town in the Hunan-province of China is home to a cascading waterfall with buildings and homes built right on top of it.
This 130ft-wide and 200ft-long fall is, at its calmest, a gently-flowing aquatic marvel. However, when heavy rains hit the region, a rush of fast-streaming water can cause it to overflow, and If I lived in one of the buildings on top of that cliff, I’d be completely terrified by the water thundering past my window!
But the waterfall is actually pretty safe, and thankfully, Furong has stood on its banks for over 2000-years without collapsing into the falls!
Schaffhausen, Switzerland
The town of Schaffhausen in Switzerland borders on one of Europe’s largest waterfalls, the Rhine Falls. The monstrous falls reach heights of over 75ft and a width of nearly 500ft, allowing over 21,000-cubic-feet of water to spill over its vast edges!
Rheinfall bei Hochwasser (Juni 2024) in 4K Ultra HD by Gosia und Michi Felux But unfortunately, this leads to incredibly strong currents in the Rhine, and swimming or falling in the river as it runs through Schaffhausen is so dangerous that it regularly leads to fatalities. Furthermore, heavy rainfall exacerbated by climate change has resulted in increased occurrences of flooding at the falls, leading to infrastructure damage in the town. Of course, Schaffhausen’s government continuously constructs new-and-improved buildings and defenses to avoid inland-flooding. But the constant flood-risk has stunted the towns development, preventing it from growing over the decades. That might be for the best though. If these small towns developed into much larger, modern cities with skyscrapers, it’d be pretty scary. I know if I lived 50-floors up, perched right on the edge of the waterfall, no amount of flood-defenses could convince me I was safe!
Ronda, Spain
If you visit the Spanish city Ronda, you may think, ‘what’s so scary about this?’ But don’t let its romantic appearance deceive you; because it's a town built on hideous heights and a horrifying history.
At 2,300ft above sea level the town rises above the clouds and fog, and it’s perched on a giant gorge called El Tajo, in the vast Serrania de Ronda mountain-range. The Puente Nuevo bridge connects the two halves of this city 322ft above the ground below, and while the resulting view is definitely gorgeous, I’d feel completely stuck up there!
Ronda,Spain 4K drone video by Kamil Krukowski In the past the defensive walls of the city and its impenetrable gorge made it an important stronghold. In fact, it was one of the last parts of Andalusia to be taken from the Islamic Population during the Catholic conquest of Spain in 1485. However, this cut-off location wasn’t great for travelers passing through Ronda, because it also meant that it’s historically had a problem with bandits. The isolated city was the perfect place for highwaymen to rob unsuspecting travelers on their way to the city, as the victims would have nowhere to go for help. In fact, in the 19th century an entire gang of bandits known as the Seven Écija Boys, operated in this area and violently robbed vulnerable people travelling to Ronda!
The city’s relationship with violence is also clear through its title as the birthplace of modern bullfighting, as the current version of the bloodsport was established there in the 18th century.
So while Ronda’s remote location and elevation offers beautiful views, in the past it was a very violent place to visit. A trip that involves dodging gangs of dangerous criminals before checking out one of the most bloodthirsty sports in modern history doesn’t sound like my idea of a relaxing vacation! I hope you were amazed at the world's scariest cities. Thanks for reading!
