Original MapBench study · 2026-10-13
The Most Isolated Major Cities in MapBench's World-City Dataset
Which major cities sit farthest from their nearest peer? We compare every city with every other city using great-circle distance.
What the ranking shows
For each city, MapBench measures the great-circle distance to every other city in the dataset, keeps the shortest of those distances, then sorts cities from the largest nearest-neighbour distance to the smallest. A higher number means the city sits farther from its nearest peer in this dataset.
Honolulu ranks first in this dataset, with its nearest listed major-city peer being San Francisco at about 3,854 km.
| Rank | City | Country | Nearest dataset city | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Honolulu | United States | San Francisco | 3,854 km |
| 2 | Perth | Australia | Adelaide | 2,131 km |
| 3 | Anchorage | United States | Vancouver | 2,129 km |
| 4 | Suva | Fiji | Auckland | 2,113 km |
| 5 | Dakar | Senegal | Abidjan | 1,802 km |
| 6 | Manaus | Brazil | Caracas | 1,693 km |
| 7 | Reykjavik | Iceland | Glasgow | 1,339 km |
| 8 | Cape Town | South Africa | Johannesburg | 1,262 km |
| 9 | Ulaanbaatar | Mongolia | Beijing | 1,168 km |
| 10 | Lima | Peru | La Paz | 1,081 km |
| 11 | La Paz | Bolivia | Lima | 1,081 km |
| 12 | Addis Ababa | Ethiopia | Mogadishu | 1,062 km |
| 13 | Fortaleza | Brazil | Salvador | 1,027 km |
| 14 | Caracas | Venezuela | Bogotá | 1,017 km |
| 15 | Mogadishu | Somalia | Nairobi | 1,015 km |
| 16 | Harare | Zimbabwe | Johannesburg | 981 km |
| 17 | Salvador | Brazil | Belo Horizonte | 965 km |
| 18 | Guatemala City | Guatemala | Puebla | 954 km |
| 19 | Beijing | China | Xi'an | 905 km |
| 20 | Jeddah | Saudi Arabia | Riyadh | 845 km |
Method
We calculate every city-to-city pair using MapBench's standard haversine great-circle function on the WGS84 mean sphere (radius 6,371.0088 km). For each origin city, only the minimum pair distance is retained.
No road distance, flight schedule or political boundary is involved. This is geometric separation between city-centre coordinates.
Important caveat
This is a ranking inside MapBench's curated major-city dataset, not a complete census of every settlement on Earth. A city can rank as isolated here even when smaller cities and towns exist nearby. Population values are approximate and are not used to determine isolation or antipode distance.
The study is useful for comparing the dataset consistently and demonstrating geographic methods. It should not be cited as an official global urban ranking without this scope note.
Reproduce the measurements
Use the same underlying tools to check individual pairs and explore your own examples.