St. Helena, United Kingdom
Population: 4,534
Nearest populated region: Angola, 1,850 kilometers (1,150 miles) away.
If getting away from the world is your thing, you will find it in Saint Helena, a volcanic island over 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and 1,850 kilometers (1,150 miles) from the African coast.
When it was discovered in 1502 by the Spanish it had no inhabitants. Today, it is administered by Britain along with the islands Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
For hundreds of years, the island has been an important port of call for ships sailing between Europe and Asia.
The island is probably most famous for being the location of Napoleon’s imprisonment when he was exiled to St. Helena in 1815. He lived in Longwood for six years before dying of stomach cancer in 1821 at the age of 51.
Napoleon wasn’t the only person sent packing to St. Helena to serve time as a captive, since from the time of its discovery its remote location made it an ideal destination to send exiles and prisoners.
It may have held 6,000 prisoners from the Boer War in the early 1900s, but today St. Helena can boast that it is home to 400 different invertebrates that exist nowhere else on Earth.
