While every city is unique, few are truly unusual. Some places are stranger than others - there are even cities that hold world records for their bizarre features! I'm Donato de Paula, narrator of Mistérios do Mundo, and here are 6 of the strangest cities on the planet.
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That's because this peculiar city is so remote and constantly hit by bad weather that almost all of its homes, businesses and public services are under one roof, with a few industrial exceptions. It is the wettest city in the United States. It snows practically every day of winter and rain is common in the other 6 months.
Furthermore, wind speeds of more than 100 kilometers per hour are not uncommon. Therefore, it becomes easier to understand why everyone decided to live in one building so they almost never had to go out into the street. Coober Pedy, Australia It is the number one source of opals in the world.
It is also home to around 3,500 people of 45 different nationalities, many of them Europeans who arrived in the 1960s in search of their fortune. This is Coober Pedy. The sleepy town in South Australia also claims another rarity - most of its inhabitants live underground.
Millions of years ago, this place was the bed of a vast ocean. The push and pull of the tide transported minerals from the sea floor into cracks in the earth, leaving behind silica deposits that gradually hardened. Today, there isn't a puddle to be seen for miles - but the ocean's legacy lives on in the glittering gems that hide in the rocky crevices.
The city's opal mines are vast and its riches are some of the most coveted in the world. And the discovery of so much wealth attracted crowds to this region, but there was a problem, as the desert climate is very arid and makes water scarce and vegetation even rarer. In summer, temperatures exceed 45 degrees, and as there is little rain, sandstorms are common.
Life above ground was unsustainable, so the newcomers did the only thing possible - they started digging. Today, the inhabitants of Coober Pedy live in cozy underground houses. They maintain a relatively comfortable temperature and are immune to sandstorms.
Colma, United States For every 1 person alive, there are 1000 dead. Every street in this village, which has 1,800 inhabitants, seems to connect to a cemetery, necropolis, columbarium or other polite term for a body dump. The last time anyone counted, the city had 17 cemeteries with 2 million graves.
Who were these people and how did they get to peaceful Colma? The history of this village is connected with one of the most famous and richest cities in the world - San Francisco. During the gold rush in the 19th and 20th centuries, it received a much larger influx of migrants than it was capable of handling.
With so many people, new diseases increased the region's mortality rate. To make matters worse, the great earthquake of 1906 destroyed San Francisco, and a few years later, a law decreed that the bodies be buried elsewhere, as there was no longer any space in the city, which had only 2 cemeteries. Many people also saw these spaces as a waste of what could be valuable real estate, in a metropolis that already didn't have much to expand to.
The village, since then, has grown little, unlike the population of dead people, which has risen exponentially. Longyearbyen, Norway The name of this city is literal, and means “long year”. That's because the sun sets for the last time on October 25th and doesn't rise again until March 8th.
Living in complete darkness for so many months is peculiar to say the least, but that's not even the strangest thing about one of the most isolated cities on the planet. What if the place you live won't officially let you die? This is more or less the situation in this village in Svalbard, which is the northernmost in the world.
The incredibly cold year-round Arctic climate does not allow the corpse to decompose, and so the small cemetery stopped accepting burials more than 70 years ago. Residents are required by law to go elsewhere to die; and if the death occurs in the city, the body must be transported to Norway by ship or plane. Xexuão, Morocco The most striking feature of this picturesque mountain town are the facades of the buildings, painted in various shades of blue.
Pale blue doors pop against whitewashed walls, and entire alleys mimic the cloudless sky above. But why was everything painted like that? There are two theories.
The first is that they believe the color blue scares away mosquitoes. The other is that Jews used this color to distinguish themselves from the green that represents Muslim culture and that was used to paint many doors and windows in other Moroccan cities. Even as the Jewish population disappeared from the area and gave way to a stronger Muslim presence , the tradition of blue buildings continued.
Whether these reasons are true or not, we cannot know. The fact is that Xexuão is one of the most beautiful villages in Morocco. Mirny, Russia In the middle of remote Siberia, there is a town known as Mirny, the only sign of humanity in a densely forested landscape for miles around.
In fact, this place would be completely normal except for one thing. There's a giant hole in the middle of the city. It is more than 300 meters deep and 1200 meters in diameter.
The hole has been part of a huge and profitable diamond mine since Soviet times . It is so deep that air traffic has been banned there. This is because some helicopters fell into the mine due to the different air masses created by temperature variations on the surface and deep down.
The city has 35 thousand inhabitants, the majority of whom work or have relatives who work in the mine, which is the largest in Siberia and is where 25% of the world's diamonds come from. Fleets of trucks carry tons of land that are washed to separate the minerals. This requires a lot of water, and creates a lot of pollution.
Nearby rivers suffer from this. And Mirny only exists because of diamonds. Today's video ends here.
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