5 cities where it's easier to die than to live

An amazing thing: it is worth pointing a finger at a place on Earth with the most terrible climate and saying that apartments there should definitely be inexpensive-and in a month there will grow a couple of high-rise buildings, a Magnet store and there will be their own homeless people. After reading this article, you will stop complaining about traffic jams, smog, and the lack of a planetarium in your area.

The rainiest place in the world is in the Indian state of Meghalaya on the border with Bangladesh. The city lies in the path of the monsoons coming to India from the southwest, right in the middle of a maze of mountains that form a kind of funnel of incoming clouds.

The average amount of precipitation here is about 3 cm daily. But this does not mean that it rains constantly in Cherapunji: five months of almost continuous downpours are followed by seven months of a hot dry season.

Considering the location of the city strategically convenient, the British colonists built a military base in Cherapunji in the early XIX century. However, they soon had to abandon this idea, as the suicide rate among the British officials stationed in the city was abnormally high. The military suffered from depression and asked to go home to sunny England. The climate has not had such an impact on local residents and does not have it.

Paradoxically, one of the main problems in Cherapunji is the lack of drinking water. The mountain on which the city is located is mostly limestone, and all the moisture seeps safely through the rock to flood Bangladesh.

La Rinconada, the highest mountain on Earth, is located in the Peruvian Andes at an altitude of 5400 meters, 20 kilometers from the border with Bolivia. The daytime temperature at this altitude usually does not rise above zero, and at night it is constantly subzero temperatures.

There are no plants suitable for food, the air is thin, and because of the lack of oxygen, a person gets tired very quickly. The inhabitants of La Rinconada live in barrack-like metal shacks huddled on the mountain slopes.

The only place in the city where you can rent a room is a brothel. There is no sanitary service here, as well as sewage, and garbage is simply thrown out on the streets or burned. Roads are regularly filled with dirt and sewage, and the soil and water are contaminated with mercury.

At the same time, over the past decade, the city has experienced a powerful influx of population: after the discovery of a gold mine in the mountains, about 50 thousand people came here. From 2001 to 2009, the number of citizens increased by 235%, and in the last six years it has doubled.

The climate of La Rinconada is not intended for permanent residence of people: everyone risks getting lung disease, asphyxia, damage to the nervous system or poisoning with toxic substances. Altitude has an extremely negative effect on a person: pulmonary edema, blood clots, kidney failure — all these diseases are common in La Rinconade.

Also, residents of the city are threatened by glacial floods, mine collapses, accidental explosions of dynamite, chemical leaks. The local prospectors are fatalists, and the death of one of their colleagues is considered a good omen for the rest. According to pagan belief, the absorption of a mountain of human brain pushes gold closer to the surface and it becomes easier to mine.

The only entertainment in the city is alcoholism, so the death rate in drunken fights is very high here. Cut this place out of your honeymoon plans.

Do you need to quickly decide where to place the three million people left homeless? If you say that you are on an active volcano, then you have definitely heard of Yogyakarta (or gone crazy).

Java has a population of 120 million, and the vast majority of them live in the immediate vicinity of active volcanoes. The most daring are the residents of Yogyakarta, the ancient capital of Indonesia, built on the Merapi volcano.

For complex historical reasons (as complex as it is boring, so just take our word for it) Yogyakarta, being a part of the Indonesian Republic, nevertheless retains independence and is governed by the Sultan. Perhaps the Indonesian authorities looked at the volcano and decided that the locals had already suffered enough troubles (or will suffer with the first eruption, which is constantly here), so they just left them alone.

The people of Yogyakarta — about 400 thousand peasants and one giant volcano, regularly spewing lava, ash and toxic gas. Eruptions are usually accompanied by earthquakes, and in 2006, one even caused a tsunami.

Ironically, the volcano is the main reason why people stay here. The locals worship Merapi as a deity. And he not only takes lives, but also gives gifts to his followers. Thanks to the volcanic activity, the soil on Merapi is extremely fertile. Residents of Yogyakarta look down on their neighbors from the island of Borneo, whose agriculture is poor, and volcanoes are so pathetic that they have not even killed anyone recently.

The town, located on the edge of the Atacama Desert, the most waterless place on Earth, is the third most visited tourist center in Chile. I bet many people come here just to understand why it was necessary to build a city where there is no water and vegetation and it never rains. This is not an exaggeration.

The unusual combination of pressure systems and geological features makes the formation of clouds over the desert literally impossible. Even germs don't live in the Atacama, and if you die in the middle of the desert, your body won't rot. Sounds hopeful, doesn't it?

In the vicinity of San Pedro de Atacama, there is still water, but it is completely unusable, as it is poisoned with arsenic. Its content exceeds the lethal dose by 60 times. Therefore, a water filtration plant has been built for tourists in the town, so the chances of surviving until the end of the vacation here are quite decent. As for the locals, over the centuries they have developed an immunity to arsenic in their bodies.

What attracts tourists to this town? We don't know. There is no night life here, local laws prohibit night carousing and drunkenness. You can only look at the deserted slopes of the bizarre shape and craters in the vicinity of the city.

Some say that the nature of the Atacama is similar to the surface of Mars or Earth after the apocalypse, and some say that the level of aridity of this place is comparable to the most powerful hangover ever experienced by man. If that's the case, we don't want to go there.

Today, Dallol is a ghost town, but 50 years ago, people lived here. In the 60s of the last century, a certain American company decided to extract potassium carbonate for fertilizers, but after two years of development, during which workers mainly hammered lava and discussed the mother of the company's director, production was curtailed.

The weather forecast in Dallola could qualify for an Oscar in the category "Disaster Film". Constant earthquakes, volcanic activity, sandstorms, subterranean lakes of acid, abnormally hot temperatures, and a soil completely unsuitable for growing anything — that's what a tourist guide to Dallol would say if it existed.

Nevertheless, the Afar basin, in which the city is located, is considered one of the birthplaces of humanity. After learning a little more about this place, you understand why our ancestors chose to settle in more favorable places.