Three remote islands far from everything to be explored in 2025

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remote islands
In this article we reveal three remote islands to visit in 2025

We are sure that if you have been following the solo Vendée Globe around the world with us (and with our highly followed Vendée Trial on Youtube), seeing these sailors battling in the middle of the oceans, in remote corners of the globe (such as the Kerguelen Islands) will have stimulated your desire for adventure. And for exploration. Well, this article, divided into three installments, is dedicated to you.


Hunting for remote islands

What does departure represent at the beginning of the third millennium? Until half a century ago, when satellites did not exist and when maps still had a few blank areas, travel was the only means of filling these gaps, of investigating the exotic, the unknown, the legend. Nowadays, the last unknowns of the atlases have been mapped, the peoples of the world catalogued, the inaccessible peaks conquered, the oceans crossed far and wide.

The Internet and powerful tools such as Google Maps have made it possible to access all this information in real time, from our homes, without having to move. Then what is left? And is it possible today to recapture the adrenaline rush of an exploratory voyage by sea, by sailboat, under the banner of the unknown, the inviolate?

This spirit can be found by pushing out by sea to islands so remote and far from the mainland that they are often not even marked on the maps of the states to which they belong. Lost islands whose attainment may represent the purpose of the voyage and enfranchise that desire, always strong in navigators, to feel far from everything and everyone.

What in this series of articles is a selection of nine “remote” destinations capable of rekindling the desire to feel like an explorer in the third millennium and giving new life to that irresistible force that since the dawn of civilization has driven man to conquer new lands to inhabit. Exploration has always been a challenge, a necessity and a manifestation of our species’ thirst for knowledge, especially the seafaring one.


Three remote islands to explore – part 1

To suggest to you these “patches of land” scattered across the Oceans, we took a cue from Judith Schalansky’s book “Atlas of Remote Islands” in which the author, fascinated especially by the islands that dot maps, creates an archive-archipelago of patches of land. “Fifty islands where I have never gone and where I will never go,” is the subtitle of the book, which collects fifty islands that are impossible for anyone to reach and “invisible even to Google Maps.” But maybe not for you. In this installment: Trindade, Bouvet, Saint Paul.


Trindade

Trindade and Martim Vaz (Brazil)

Lost Islands - Trinidade

Area: 10 sq. km | 32 inhabitants Coordinates: 20° 30′ S 29° 20′ W Distances: 1140 km → from Vitòria 1150 km → from Rio de Janeiro 2540 km → from St. Helena Discovery: May 18, 1502 →Vasco de Gama

Trinidade - Map
Lost Islands: Trindade – Map

Why go to Trindade

This island seems thrown into the ocean because of its location in the middle of the South Atlantic, between Brazil and Africa. It is inhabited by thirty-two people between military personnel dedicated to maintaining sovereignty over the island and volunteers engaged in environmental missions. The most popular means of transportation to reach the island is by helicopter; by ship it takes at least three days. Steep and hostile, from this handkerchief of land the sea plunges deep immediately and reaches 5,000 meters.

Don’t plan to drop anchor in Trindade…. steep and craggy, the sea plunges immediately to a depth of over five thousand meters. On the upside, you don’t need money or papers to disembark….

The island is an extinct submerged volcano, like an iceberg, with less than 10 percent of the size above the water surface. Thirteen kilometers long above sea level, the island reaches fifty kilometers by touching the seabed. The land, inhabited mostly by crabs and turtles, is a true topographical mix with sparse vegetation: rocks, reefs, chasms of the most varied colors, a forest of ferns. All beaten by perfect waves-a surfer’s dream. A place, this, where no money or documents are needed to land and where nature still follows its original course. A legend says that those who drink from the spring water source, the only one on the island, are destined sooner or later to return.


Bouvet

(Norway)

Lost Islands - Bouvet

Area: 49 sq. km | uninhabited
Coordinates: 54° 25′ S 3° 21′ E
Distances: 2510 km → from Cape of Good Hope 1910 km → from Tristan de Cuhna 1700 km → from Antarctica Discovery: January 1, 1739 → Jean-Baptiste Bouvet

Lost Islands: Bouvet - Map
Lost Islands: Bouvet – Map

Why go to Bouvet

“On British nautical charts there is an unwritten surface with only one uncertain indication: a small archipelago below the 54th degree of latitude, sighted by Bouvet who thought it the head of the southern continent. Neither Cook, Ross nor Moore found it again. Only the captains of two whalers saw the islands, but they calculated their position divergently.” After Bouvet’s first sighting, this land was found after 75 years. A single craggy island, however, of wild magnificence: the walls are all frozen and the glaciers drop steeply to the surface of the sea: an imposing land of perennial snows.

Bouvet islands
The boat adventure to Bouvet Island is an icy challenge. It is impossible to dock on this island, let alone drop anchor there. A journey to be made with a steel hull.

An island halfway between Africa and Antarctica. Precisely because of its location, it is considered the most remote island on the planet, and probably the landmass furthest from human settlement. Reaching it is incredibly difficult: its cliffs fall sheer to the sea, and to set foot on it, one must reach the coast by ship and be transported to the island by helicopter. There are no ports, or even docking points for ships, given the risk posed by the dangerous reefs and the almost constantly rough sea.


Saint Paul

(France)

Lost Islands - Saint Paul

Area: 7 sq. km | uninhabited
Coordinates: 38° 43′ S 77° 31′ E
Distances: 4290 km → from South Africa 3010 km → from Antarctica 2260 km → from Possession Island The discovery: April 19, 1618 → Harwick Claesez de Hillegom

Lost Islands: Saint Paul - Map
Lost Islands: Saint Paul – Map

Why go to Saint Paul

When France grabbed the volcanic islet of Saint-Paul, it incorporated it into the French Department of the Southern and Antarctic Lands. The island is very far from any inhabited place and distant from trade routes: it lies in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean, 4290 km from South Africa. The island of Saint Paul consists of a volcanic cone that has partially sunk into the sea to create a welcoming bay in the shape of a semicircle that is the only landfall.

Lost Islands - Saint Paul
Lost Islands – Saint Paul

Lost islands, in the next installment

  • Napuka (French Polynesia)
  • Howland (United States)
  • Fangataufa (French Polynesia)

  • This article was published in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of Sailing.

  • The volume mentioned in the report, in its updated version (“Atlas of Remote Islands. New Updated Edition” by Judith Schalansky, Bompiani, 160 pages, 23.75 euros), you can purchase it here

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