In the far corners of Earth, where winter feels more like a way of life than a season, there are villages and towns where people still live, work, and raise families in bone-chilling cold. These are the coldest inhabited places on the planet—communities where thermometers sometimes plunge below minus 60°C and yet life carries on, stubborn and strangely poetic. Far from being frozen outposts of hardship, many of these places have developed their own rhythms, traditions, and even comfort in the icy silence around them.
Oymyakon, Russia
Tucked in northeastern Siberia, Oymyakon is often called the coldest inhabited place on Earth. Winter temperatures regularly hover around minus 50°C to minus 60°C, with the record dropping close to minus 70°C, yet a small community of a few hundred people still lives there year-round. Life here revolves around reindeer, hardy livestock, and foods that can survive freezing—like frozen fish, horsemeat, and rich fatty soups that keep bodies warm through the long nights.
Verkhoyansk, Russia
Not far from Oymyakon lies the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, famous for having one of the widest temperature swings on Earth. In winter it can sink to about minus 68°C, while in summer it can climb above 35°C, giving it a record difference of over 100°C. This extreme climate has shaped a tough, resilient culture where homes are built on wooden stilts to avoid frost heave, and people move quickly through the streets when the cold bites.
Yakutsk, Russia
Yakutsk, the capital of Siberia's Sakha Republic, is the largest and coldest city where people live in permanent structures. With recorded winter temperatures down to about minus 64°C and a permanent layer of permafrost under the ground, everything from pipes to roads is built on piles to keep them from freezing solid. Yet Yakutsk hums with life—markets, schools, and offices function in the cold, and locals joke that the city is so icy that hot tea turns into ice before you can drink it.
Vostok Station, Antarctica
Far from ordinary villages, Russia's Vostok Station on the Antarctic ice sheet holds the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth—around minus 89°C. It is not a normal town, but a small scientific research station where a rotating crew of scientists lives in near-total isolation for months at a time. In summer, the sun never sets; in winter, it never rises, and the cold is so extreme that metal can snap and batteries lose power almost instantly.
Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska
On the northernmost tip of Alaska, Utqiagvik sits above the Arctic Circle, where winter temperatures can fall below minus 40°C and the sun vanishes for weeks. The local Iñupiat people have lived here for thousands of years, adapting to extreme cold with insulated clothing, whale-oil lamps in the old days, and now modern housing that can withstand freezing blizzards. Life here is deeply tied to the sea and ice—hunting, fishing, and dog-sledding remain part of daily rhythm, even as the world warms around them.
Drass, India
Drass, sometimes written as Dras, lies in the Kargil district of Ladakh, just a short drive from the Zoji La Pass toward Srinagar. It is widely regarded as the coldest permanently inhabited place in India, with winter temperatures routinely dropping between -20°C and minus 25°C, and in extreme years touching as low as minus 40°C or even minus 60°C in some records. Despite the brutal cold, thousands of people—including Balti and Dardic communities—live here year-round, making a life that is as defiant as it is quietly ordinary.
Why these places still fascinate us
What makes these frigid towns and villages so compelling is that they defy the instinctive human urge to run from the cold. In Oymyakon, Verkhoyansk, Yakutsk, and Utqiagvik, ordinary people cook, children run schools, and they even fall in love, and the cold presses in from every direction. They stand as quiet proof that human life can not only survive in the coldest corners of the world, but can also build its own warmth—through community, tradition, and the stubborn will to keep going, even when the air itself feels like glass.
