TIL Spain has a few completely uninhabited big islands.

And some of them are pretty Big. Afaik the largest is Alegranza island just off the coast of Fuerteventura (canary islands) rounding at 10km²

I know Portugal also has several big uninhabited islands in the Atlantic, but i’m curious to know about other European countries.

if you could give some context as to why they’re uninhabited and what are they used for nowadays, It would be great.

Turns out Alegranza Island is a volcanic wasteland, thus why It’s desolate. As for its use, the island is privately owned.

42 comments

  1. Hmmm… I don’t think so; well plenty of small islands, like ranging from 0,5km^2 to 2,50km^2 without population. But at the same time, we also have tiny islands sized <0,1km^2 with registered inhabitants. So like, it depends.

    Most of the Danish islands are, however, inhabited, though insular communities, outside of the largest islands, are dvindling, and have been for the last century, or about the last century. It simply isn’t viable for most modern Danes to live on isolated islands. So you can sail around Denmark and find many abandoned, or largely, abandoned islands as well, with empty villages and ruined churches and such. Also, actually, you wont find many empty villages, since it was normal to tear down the villages and use the lumber and bricks and such elsewhere.

    A lot of the inhabitants of the smallest islands are stationed there by the Danish Nature Agency, and are generally either foresters, forest riders, or forest runners, who are tasked with protecting and upkeeping the islands, and their nature. So the populations will usually be around the size of a small family. I actually have a friend who, along with his wife, applied to become such an “island keeper” _just_ before Covid, so they’ve spend the last 2 years in _almost_ perfect insular isolation, on full pay.

    Sometimes the reason larger islands are uninhabited, is if they’ve been used for grazing of cattle, or as pure farmland, we have a couple of examples of that. Sometimes they are just unfit for habitation, because they’re nothing but glorified sand-banks with a couple of scrawny trees.

  3. The largest uninhabited Swedish island is Gotska Sandön https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotska_Sand%C3%B6n a national park (44.9 km2).

    Edit: Some staff seem to be living on the island according to the Wikipedia page in Swedish.

    The second largest is Rånön https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A5n%C3%B6n uninhabited since late 1960s (10 km2).

    Among the 50 largest islands in Sweden those are the only uninhabited. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_%C3%B6ver_%C3%B6ar_i_Sverige

  4. The Netherlands has Rottumeroog, rottumerplaat and griend. All 3 it’s just said with maybe some grass. Rottumerplaat is 7,82km2

  5. Italy has Asinara,off the north coast of Sardinia.

    It’s a national park now.I don’t know if it has any official inhabitants… maybe just a caretaker.

    It’s quite large,like 50 square kilometres.

    It used to hold prisoners, for many years.. the prison finally closed around 25 years ago.

  6. The most well known is the St Kilda Archipelago, off the North West coast. The largest island is 6.7 sq km. It was evacuated in 1930 due to the difficulty of life there. It remains an important breeding site for seabirds.

  8. Portugal has a few uninhabited islands, but they’re not that big. The only ones larger than 0.5Km^(2) are Deserta Grande (10Km^(2)), Ilha do Bugio (3Km^(2)), Selvagem Grande (2.45Km^(2)) and Ilhéu Chão (1Km^(2)), all in the Madeira Archipelago. There are several more, but they’re tiny.

    Of these, Selvagem Grande has a permanent Maritime Police post, so it’s not 100% uninhabited; and Deserta Grande receives visitors and people conducting nature surveys and monitoring projects.

  9. Yeah due to Svalbard, the arctic archipelago in the north we have a few uninhabited big islands. Only the biggest island of Spitsbergen is inhabited. The largest uninhabited would be [Nordaustlandet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordaustlandet), at the size of 14.500km². Pretty much just ice, polar bears and walruses up there.

    There are also plenty near the mainland, although not anywhere near that size.

  11. I don’t think so, the blanket islands had all of their population moved onto the mainland about 70 years ago, tha largest of them is ~4.5km², but afaik they built a tourist office and there’s now about 2 or 3 staff who live on the island for most of the year. Other than that, there’s no other major islands that are fully uninhabited.

  12. Sooo many, since we have French Polynesia and French Antilles, there is hundreds if not thousands of islands and lots of them are not habitated anymore, most of them are kept as a natural reserve to preserve the island.

  14. The only ones I can think of in England are Lundy (a pirate haven) and Brownsea Island (a red squirrel haven). Probably tons more in Scotland though.

    If we’re counting the overseas territories my guess would be that South Georgia would be the biggest one. There’s a massive abandoned town there that used to be a whaling station and it was invaded by Argentina during the Falklands War. IIRC they had a massive invasive rat problem and recently succeeded in exterminating them from the island.

  15. The largest in the UK is [Taransay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taransay), unsurprisingly in the Outer Hebrides, coming in at 14.75 square kilometres (5.7 square miles). The Outer Hebrides are altogether very huge and very sparsely populated by European standards, with just nine people per square kilometre in a total area of over 3,000km² (~1,200 square miles). Even then, over a third of the total ~27,000 population lives in Stornoway parish, the de facto capital.

    The Outer Hebrides as a whole are very remote, cold and _extremely_ windy, so people haven’t exactly been beating down the door to live there in modern times. There used to be a lot more people there (relative to what was normal for the time anyway), but they were particularly badly hit by the [Highland Clearances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances), which is a very long and sorry story.

    Taransay itself was inhabited right up until the 1970s, historically a decent-sized village, but for the last years just by a single family. I can’t find a specific tale about why, but most stories like this in Scotland (and there are quite a lot of them) are a combination of the Clearances and the urbanisation pressure of the modern world. It is now privately owned and has some holiday cottages, and was notable as the setting of a BBC show called [Castaway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castaway_2000), which shipped 36 people out to it to live there for a year and try to build a community.

  17. Finland has quite a few but it’s no wonder with quarter million islands and only 5.5million people (thanks ice age), here’s some with fun facts:

    Kokkosaari – the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake in the world (inception bruh)
    Vihreäsaari – while the name means “green island”, this uninhabited island is in fact one of the most important oil docks in the north and not that green
    Märket – the westernmost point of Finland in the archipelago of Åland – this island is divided in two by Finland and Sweden, and the Swedish part is shared between two counties, Stockholm and Uppsala
    Saaranpaskantamasaari – it’s right by the Russian border so probably that’s why it’s uninhabited, but this place is amazing due to its name which translates to “Island shat by Saara”, Saara being a female name.

  18. Yes. In the middle of Vienna there is the “Donauinsel” (danube island, 3.9 km^2 ) between the Danube and the New Danube. The New Danube is technically a lake for most of the time, runs in parallel to the Danube and is used for flood protection.

  19. No, we don’t have any islands far from the coast. We once had Madagascar for a few years and tried to peacefully colonise Kameroon but that’s all.

  20. We have a few, but how many all depends on what you call an island and what you call a shoal. I’m honestly not sure about the difference. So thus we have anywhere between 5 and 15 islands, all depending on your definitions

    In the north, from west to east: Noorderhaaks, Rottumerplaat, Rottumeroog and Griend. There may be more, but at a certain point it’s hard to say which ones are islands and which one are shoals (I think there are 5 bigger than 0.5 km). They are all in the Waddenzee. Basically all of them are now nature areas, and I’m not even sure if you can visit them. It’s also one of the parts of the country that we just don’t defend against the sea.

    Then there is the island of Neeltje Jans, in the middle of the Oosterscheldekering. It was used as a work station during the building of the Delta Works, it’s about 2.5 square km big. It’s the biggest uninhabited island in Zeeland, and is now in use for recreation. In Zeeland, the southwest of the Netherlands, has a few more shoals that are bigger than 0.5 square km, I think it’s 5.

    In the past we had a lot more islands, but a lot of them have now been made part of the mainland, or have been combined into bigger islands. For example, Zeeland at one point consisted of about 30 islands, while it nowadays consists of basically 2 islands and three peninsulas.

  22. We have quite a lot. There are around 100k islands smaller than 0,5 km2 area in Finland. If you include the larger ones, we have 178 947. There are 549 permanently inhabited islands in Finland with no road connection to mainland. 🙂

  23. According to an [article](https://www.blikk.hu/aktualis/bucsuzik-a-margitsziget-utolso-lakoja/3le7vll), Margaret Island in Budapest (0.965 km^(2)) has been uninhabited since 2014.

    After some time spent on Google Maps, I found Táti-sziget/Körtvélyes-sziget (the two seem to be connected) to be 3.75 km^(2) and uninhabited. Veránka-sziget is 10 km^(2), but it has a hotel and possibly some residences as well. All of the aforementioned islands are in the Danube.

    There might be other/larger uninhabited islands as well, but I don’t know…

  25. We will have after the Vistula Spit Canal completes. The birds sued the country for destroying their homes, so they’ll get an island just for themselves.

    I’m gonna assume you meant uninhabited by humans.

  28. In the UK as a whole i think the largest uninhabited island is Taransay, it’s privately owned and has a couple holiday homes on it i think but no-one lives there permanently and that’s 11km^(2). In England we have Samson which is unhabited but tiny at 38 hectares or 0.38km^(2).

  29. Portugal has several islands and most of them have plenty of people, even the smaller ones. I think there’s some near the Canary islands that are closed off because it’s a protected habitat. I could be wrong though.

  31. With its oversea territories our country have tons of uninhabited islands

    For example l’île de l’Est (East island) is 130 km2 and have no inhabitant because it is part of the Crozet Islands, that are located in the South Indian Ocean near Antarctica. It’s too far, too cold, too harsh to be habitable. This island has no real use, as far as I know

    We even have a whole administrative region made out (mostly) of uninhabited islands, the [TAAF](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Southern_and_Antarctic_Lands), which has a nice flag too. They’re mostly used for scientific research on the environment, zoology, climate and astronomy, as some scientists work here, among the penguins

  32. The largest Polish one is Wielki Krzek (around 14 km2)

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    It’s uninhabited as it’s part of a National park.

  34. [Polyaigos](https://www.google.com/search?q=polyaigos&client=firefox-b-m&sxsrf=AOaemvLEq8x6MV5DxQx493HLlozxbOoMUQ:1642027476313&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP8r6Dpa31AhVgQ_EDHc5zCPEQ_AUIBigB&biw=396&bih=738&biw=396&bih=738) is the largest uninhabited Greek island, around 18km². It is worth including it in one’s itinerary, when taking a boat trip around Milos or Kimolos. The cliffs look amazing and the water is sooo blue and clear. 👌 It is only inhabited by goats btw 🐐

  35. In Germany, we have some islands that are nature reserves and no one but a ranger lives there. The largest one is [Memmert](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memmert) in the Ems esturary. It has about 5 km². Another one is [Mellum](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellum) in the Jade esturary.

    There are some smaller islands in the area that are inhabited, for example [Neuwerk](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuwerk) or [Oland](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oland).

  36. Sa Conillera (island of rabbits) is 100 ha (1 km²). Sa Dragonera (island of geckos) is 288 ha (2,88 km²). Both on the Balearic islands. In Catalonia I think we only have the Illes Formigues (Ant Islands), but adding them (16) all, they are only 0,3 ha.

  37. Sardinia (Italy) is surrounded by many uninhabited islands much larger than 0.5 km², included the largest uninhabited italian island:

    * the Asinara Island **(51.9 km²**) which it’s a National Park and a former penal colony, maximum security prison and a concentration camp during the World Wars.
    * Piana Island belongs to the same archipelago and it is 0.77 km² large.

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    The Archipelago of La Maddalena which it’s a national park too (La Maddalena National Park) has got other uninhabited islands, the largest ones are:

    * Santo Stefano (3 km²)
    * Santa Maria (2 km²)
    * Spargi (4,2 km²)
    * Budelli (1,6 km2)
    * Razzoli (1,5 km²)

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    Molara island (3,411 km²) is another unsettled island and it’s close to Tavolara island (regarded as a Microstate, only few descendants of the former kingdom lives there).

    Mortorio (0.6 km²) and the close Soffi Island (0.5 km²) are uninhabited too.

    The Malu Entu island in the Gulf of Oristano is 0.8 km2 and it is desert too.

  38. (Australia is in Eurovision so it counts right?) Yeah we have one, it’s about 7.692 million km² with a population of 0, i don’t actually know if it is real or not but it is said to be to dangerous to inhabit thanks to it’s wildlife

  39. Norway have ALOT of islands, so we might have some?

    Norway has 239,057 islands and only 2000 islands has people living on them.

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