In a world that feels increasingly crowded, home to more than eight billion people, the idea of a truly empty place seems like a fantasy. We picture humanity’s reach as absolute, a web of cities, towns, and roads blanketing the globe. But look closer at the satellite maps, beyond the familiar lights of civilization, and you’ll find them: Earth’s last great voids. Beyond the obvious icy wilderness of the poles, vast, contiguous landscapes exist with virtually zero permanent human population. These are the planet’s true “empty quarters”, places where geography itself—in its most extreme forms—has kept humanity at bay.

The Great Deserts: Earth’s Sandy Voids

The most intuitive empty places are the ones defined by a lack of water. Deserts are the classic wilderness, and several stand out not just for their size, but for the sheer emptiness of their core.

The Rub’ al Khali, Arabian Peninsula

Its name literally translates from Arabic to “the Empty Quarter”, and it lives up to the title. Sprawling across parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, and Yemen, the Rub’ al Khali is the largest continuous sand desert (erg) in the world. This is not just a landscape of rolling dunes; it’s a sea of sand the size of France, with some dunes towering over 250 meters (800 feet). The climate is hyper-arid, with summer temperatures regularly soaring above 50°C (122°F). For millennia, even the famously resilient Bedouin nomads, who masterfully navigated the fringes of Arabia’s deserts, treated the Rub’ al Khali’s core as a near-impenetrable barrier. Today, its vast interior remains utterly uninhabited, a silent world of wind and sand, disturbed only by the occasional oil exploration crew.

The Heart of the Sahara

While the Sahara as a whole is crisscrossed by ancient caravan routes and home to nomadic peoples like the Tuareg, its sheer scale guarantees pockets of absolute emptiness. Regions like the central Libyan Desert or the Ténéré in Niger contain some of the most inaccessible terrain on the planet. Here, the landscape is a hostile mix of towering sand seas, flat gravel plains (reg) that stretch to the horizon, and baked, rocky plateaus (hamada). With annual rainfall measured in millimeters (if it falls at all), and no surface water for hundreds of kilometers, permanent settlement is a physical impossibility. These Saharan cores are among the most sun-scorched, arid places on Earth, true voids where survival is measured in hours, not days.

The Australian Outback

Australia’s “dead heart” is a mosaic of deserts—the Great Sandy, the Gibson, and the Great Victoria—that together form one of the largest arid, unpopulated regions on Earth. While Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the continent for over 60,000 years with an incredible understanding of its ecology, their populations have traditionally been concentrated around water sources and more fertile lands on the deserts’ perimeters. The deep interior, a vast expanse of red sand, spinifex grass, and searing heat, remains one of the planet’s most sparsely populated areas, with huge tracts of land seeing no permanent human presence at all.

The Green Hells: Impenetrable Jungles

Paradoxically, some of the planet’s emptiest places are not defined by a lack of life, but by an overabundance of it. Dense, tropical rainforests can be just as effective a barrier as a waterless desert.

The Amazonian Core

The Amazon rainforest is famously home to numerous indigenous groups, including some of the last uncontacted peoples on Earth. However, the term “unpeopled” must be used carefully here. There are vast areas, particularly in the borderlands between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, that are believed to have no permanent settlements, not even by isolated tribes. These zones are often characterized by terra firme (land that doesn’t flood) with extremely poor, acidic soil, or are vast, seasonally flooded swamp forests (igapó) where establishing a permanent village is impossible. The combination of dense vegetation that blocks out the sun, swarms of disease-carrying insects, dangerous fauna, and the sheer logistical nightmare of navigating the terrain makes these jungle cores a true “green hell”, uninhabitable for sustained periods.

The Mountains of New Guinea

The island of New Guinea contains the world’s third-largest rainforest and some of its most rugged terrain. The central highlands are a chaotic landscape of steep-sided valleys, impenetrable cloud forests, and jagged karst (limestone) topography. While its isolated valleys are famous for hosting an incredible diversity of tribal groups, the highest mountain ridges and deepest, most precipitous gorges are truly empty. This is a powerful example of vertical geography at work: populated valleys can lie just a few kilometers from completely uninhabited mountain wilderness, separated by near-vertical walls of rock and jungle. The sheer physical effort required to cross this terrain has created vertical empty quarters, slivers of uninhabited land pressed between pockets of humanity.

The Cuvette Centrale, Congo Basin

Deep in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo lies the Cuvette Centrale, a massive depression in the center of the Congo Basin. This area contains some of the world’s largest tropical swamp forests. It is a world of water, mud, and vegetation, seasonally—and in some cases, permanently—flooded. The logistical challenges are immense. There is little solid ground for agriculture or building, and travel is restricted to waterways that are themselves a labyrinth. While people live around its edges, the swampy core of the Cuvette Centrale is a vast, watery wilderness, one of Africa’s largest and least-known unpeopled spaces.

High-Altitude Voids

Beyond heat and vegetation, a third barrier keeps humanity away: altitude. Thin air and extreme cold create deserts of another kind.

The Changtang Plateau, Tibet

Known as “the roof of the world”, the Tibetan Plateau is the highest and largest plateau on Earth. Its northernmost region, the Changtang, is a vast, high-altitude steppe and tundra stretching for hundreds of kilometers. With an average elevation exceeding 4,500 meters (15,000 feet), the air is thin, and the winters are brutally long and cold, with temperatures plunging far below freezing. While the southern Changtang is home to the nomadic Changpa people and their goats, the northern reaches are simply too high, too cold, and too barren for even them. This section of the plateau is a vast, rolling wilderness of permafrost and alpine desert, one of the largest non-polar cold wildernesses left on the planet.

From scorching desert sands to waterlogged jungles and frozen alpine plateaus, these empty quarters serve as powerful reminders of the raw power of physical geography. They are landscapes where climate, topography, and the biosphere have conspired to create barriers that human ingenuity and resilience have not yet overcome. In our interconnected age, there is a certain solace in knowing that such vast, wild, and truly empty places still exist.