Tristan da Cunha (Island Week 3)

Thursday, 4th September 2008 by

It’s Island Week 3 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. It'll probably last about a week.

The island of Tristan da Cunha and its surrounding archipelago are located in the southern Atlantic ocean, 2816 km from the nearest continent, making it the most remote island in the world!

Tristan da Cunha is a dependency of the British overseas territory Saint Helena, and also a live volcanic island. The main settlement, "Edinburgh of the Seven Seas"1, had to be temporarily abandoned in 1961 due the volcano erupting.

As Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is 2,400 km from the main settlement on Saint Helena, it chalks up an additional record of the "most remote permanent settlement in the world".

The other islands in the archipelago include Gough Island, which has a temporary population of 6 South Africans who work at the small weather station

… and the mysterious sounding Inaccessible Island. Officially uninhabited (presumably for obvious reasons), Inaccessible Island also appears to be inaccessible to high-resolution photography satellites (unlike the rest of the archipelago).

More info on Tristan da Cunha, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas and Saint Helena can be found at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Nico, Tom and Matt.


  1. The town is named after the second son of Queen Victoria, Prince Alfred the Duke of Edinburgh, who visited the island in 1867. ↩︎