No Room Left (10 Photos)

Ten places with homes packed tightly together

An island with no space left for a cemetery. A town whose people almost all share one building. A village where the roofs are the streets. These ten places are real, and people still live in nine of them.

More: Living on the Edge (15 Photos)

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🏘️ Masouleh — Gilan, Iran 🇮🇷

The houses climb the mountain so steeply that the roofs became the streets. In Masouleh, the roofs double as public lanes and gathering places, so you walk across one family’s roof to reach the next door up. No cars are allowed.

💡 Age Fact: The village sits on a steep slope in the Alborz mountains and is eight hundred to a thousand years old, according to Iran’s nomination for UNESCO’s tentative list.

📷 Photo: “Masouleh, rooftop village” by Blondinrikard Fröberg / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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⭕ Mexcaltitán — Nayarit, Mexico 🇲🇽

A whole town on a round island about 400 meters across, in a lagoon on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Mexcaltitán had 818 people at the 2010 census, packed onto every bit of the island. Mexico’s INAH says the island is usually flooded in the rainy season, so people get around by boat.

💡 Legend Fact: In the 1960s some researchers thought this was Aztlán, the legendary homeland of the Aztecs. The theory was later dropped, but the legend stuck.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Isla Mexcaltitan” by Luis Méndez Covarrubias / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🚢 Hashima (Battleship Island) — Nagasaki, Japan 🇯🇵

From the sea it looks like a warship, which is why it is called Gunkanjima. Hashima covers just 6.3 hectares, yet at its 1959 peak it held more than 5,200 people, living in concrete blocks around an undersea coal mine. The mine closed in 1974 and the island emptied within months.

💡 History Fact: It became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2015. At the listing, Japan acknowledged that many Koreans and others were brought against their will and forced to work at some of the listed sites in the 1940s. Tour boats land visitors on a small fenced part of the island.

📷 Photo: “Gunkanjima Island from the Sea” by Jordy Meow / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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⛪ Hallstatt — Upper Austria, Austria 🇦🇹

The lake on one side, a mountain on the other, and the village on the thin strip in between. Hallstatt has under 800 residents, and the first road into it, the Seestraße along the lake, was only built in 1890. Before that, people came by boat or on bridle paths.

💡 Skull Fact: The cemetery has no room to grow, so graves were reopened after 10 to 15 years and the bones moved to the bone house. It holds about 1,200 skulls, 610 of them painted, says the regional tourist board.

📷 Photo: “Hallstatt” by Kevin Poh / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🏔️ Begich Towers — Whittier, Alaska, USA 🇺🇸

Almost the whole town of Whittier lives in this one 14-story building, finished in 1957 as the Army’s Hodge Building. Whittier had 272 people at the 2020 census. Inside, NPR found the post office near the entrance, the police station down the hall, a store, a clinic and a church in the basement.

💡 Tunnel Fact: The school is reached through a tunnel, and the only road into town is a one-lane tunnel shared by cars and trains, running on a fixed timetable.

📷 Photo: “Begich Towers Condominium (Whittier, Alaska)” by Quintin Soloviev / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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🕌 Melika — M’zab Valley, Algeria 🇩🇿

On the hill behind the newer houses, the old town of Melika is one solid block of homes wrapped around its mosque. It is one of five fortified towns of the M’zab Valley, founded between about 1,000 and 700 years ago. UNESCO says each one rings its hilltop mosque with houses in circles all the way out to the walls.

💡 Watchtower Fact: The minaret at the top of each town also served as a watchtower, and the valley’s compact houses later influenced Le Corbusier, according to UNESCO.

📷 Photo: “Vue Ghardaia Melika” by Camille Gillet / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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⛰️ Rocinha — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 🇧🇷

Homes built on top of homes, all the way up the steep hill above São Conrado in Rio de Janeiro. Rocinha is Brazil’s most populous favela: the 2022 census counted 72,021 residents.

💡 Count Fact: The runner-up was Sol Nascente in Brasília, with 70,908 people, according to IBGE.

📷 Photo: “Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro Project” by Wilfredor / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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🏝️ Santa Cruz del Islote — San Bernardo Islands, Colombia 🇨🇴

Not one patch of empty ground: houses run right down to the water on Santa Cruz del Islote, an island of about 1.2 hectares off Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Fishermen began settling it in the 1860s, and local counts put around 800 people in roughly 160 houses on it today, though estimates run from about 500 to 1,200.

💡 Room Fact: There is no space for a cemetery, so the dead are buried on the neighboring island of Tintipán, and the island sits only about a meter above the sea, Voice of America reports.

📷 Photo: “Santa Cruz del Islote 2022 01” by Vaido Otsar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🏢 Montane Mansion — Quarry Bay, Hong Kong 🇭🇰

This is the view straight up from the courtyard of the estate people call the Monster Building in Quarry Bay. Its five blocks, built in the 1960s and early 1970s, hold 2,243 flats on 18 floors, home to an estimated 10,000 people.

💡 Quiet Fact: People still live behind every one of those windows. Since 2018 signs in the courtyard have banned photography without permission, and visitors are asked to respect residents’ privacy.

📷 Photo and cover crop: “Montane Mansion courtyard upward view Quarry Bay Hong Kong 2024 dllu” by Daniel Lu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🧱 Shibam — Hadhramaut, Yemen 🇾🇪

Hundreds of mud-brick towers squeezed inside one wall in the desert valley of Wadi Hadhramaut. Instead of spreading out, Shibam built up: about 500 tower houses rise 5 to 11 stories, some around 30 meters. UNESCO describes a 16th-century city of tower houses, built that way for refuge and protection. It is often called “the Manhattan of the desert.”

💡 Mud Fact: The towers are sun-dried mud brick, and floods are one of their biggest threats. UNESCO has listed Shibam as World Heritage since 1982 and as in danger since 2015.

📷 Photo: “Shibam Wadi Hadhramaut Yemen” by Jialiang Gao / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)