Some islands are beach-vacation islands. These are the other kind — the ones whose backstories read like a novelist got carried away. Thirteen islands that out-plotted fiction.
Pitcairn Island is still populated by descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty.
Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers arrived with Tahitian companions in 1790 and burned the ship to hide from the Royal Navy. Today a few dozen residents remain, making it one of the smallest permanently inhabited territories on Earth.
Brazil's Ilha da Queimada Grande — Snake Island — is so full of venomous vipers that the navy bans civilians from landing.
It's the only home of the golden lancehead, a critically endangered pit viper that evolved in isolation to hunt migrating birds; researchers estimate a few thousand snakes on the small island. The popular 'one snake per square meter' claim is an exaggeration, but not by as much as you'd like.
North Sentinel Island is home to a people who have refused contact with the outside world into the present day.
The Sentinelese, numbering perhaps a few dozen to a couple hundred, have repelled nearly all approaches, and India enforces an exclusion zone around the island partly to protect them from outside diseases. In 2018, an American missionary who landed illegally was killed, and India made no attempt to recover the island.
Japan's Hashima Island was once among the most densely populated places on Earth — then emptied almost overnight.
Built up around an undersea coal mine, the concrete island packed over 5,000 people onto about 16 acres by 1959. When the mine closed in 1974, everyone left within months, leaving a ghost city at sea that later served as a villain's lair backdrop in Skyfall.
Nearly everyone on Palmerston Island descends from one Englishman.
William Marsters settled the Cook Islands atoll in 1863 with three wives, and today's few dozen residents nearly all trace back to him, organized into three family branches. Supply ships come only a handful of times a year.
Surtsey didn't exist until 1963 — it erupted out of the sea off Iceland, on camera.
The volcanic eruption ran until 1967 and built a brand-new island that scientists immediately declared a pristine natural laboratory, off-limits to nearly everyone. When a tomato plant sprouted from an improperly handled call of nature, researchers dug it up to keep the experiment clean.
In 1831, a new island appeared off Sicily — and four nations started claiming it before it sank back into the sea.
Britain called it Graham Island, the Sicilians called it Ferdinandea, the French called it Julia, and within about six months the loose volcanic cone eroded below the waves, mooting the dispute. It still lurks a few meters under the surface, ready to restart the argument.
Sandy Island appeared on maps — including Google's — for over a century before scientists discovered it didn't exist.
Charted in the Coral Sea since the 1870s, it was 'undiscovered' in 2012 when an Australian research ship sailed to its coordinates and found open ocean more than a kilometer deep. The likeliest culprit: a long-ago crew logging a floating pumice raft as land.
Bouvet Island, the most remote island on Earth, has one enduring mystery: an abandoned lifeboat found there in 1964, with no trace of its passengers.
The uninhabited Norwegian territory sits over 1,500 kilometers from Antarctica's coast, yet a whaleboat was found in a lagoon with supplies nearby and no bodies, no markings, and no distress record. Researchers have proposed explanations involving a Soviet expedition, but the case has never been definitively closed.
Tristan da Cunha, the world's most remote inhabited island, was once evacuated entirely — and almost everyone chose to come back.
When the volcano erupted in 1961, all ~260 islanders were evacuated to England; within two years, the vast majority voted to return to their settlement, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, some 2,400 kilometers from the nearest inhabited land. Modern life had two years to make its pitch and lost.
The Diomede Islands sit 3.8 kilometers apart — and about 21 hours apart.
Little Diomede is Alaska; Big Diomede is Russia; the international date line runs between them, earning them the nicknames Yesterday Isle and Tomorrow Island. From one, you can stand in the afternoon and look at tomorrow.
Migingo, a rock in Lake Victoria smaller than a soccer field, is crammed with residents and claimed by two countries.
The islet's rich surrounding fishing grounds drew a dense cluster of fishermen and traders, plus a long-running Kenya-Uganda sovereignty dispute journalists dubbed 'Africa's smallest war.' The fight has stayed bureaucratic — flags, patrols, and taxes rather than shots.
Just Room Enough Island holds one house, one tree, and essentially nothing else.
The Sizeland family bought the tiny Thousand Islands islet in the 1950s and built a cottage covering nearly the entire landmass, popularizing it as one of the smallest inhabited islands anywhere. The name is not a joke; it's a survey.
The trophy goes to Sandy Island, which spent a hundred years on official maps doing absolutely nothing — because it was never there.
