Driest Inhabited Places on Earth
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Driest Inhabited Places on EarthThese towns receive almost no rain at all: most average under 2.5 mm per year, thousands of times less than the world's wettest places. Arica in Chile, often cited as the driest inhabited place on Earth, averages just 0.76 mm annually, while nearby Antofagasta and Egypt's Luxor are similarly parched at well under 1 mm. Two geographic settings dominate: the Atacama Desert of South America, where a cold ocean current and mountain barriers block virtually all moisture, and the eastern Sahara and Nile Valley (Wadi Halfa, Aswan, Luxor), where subtropical high pressure suppresses rainfall year-round. Survival in these places depends almost entirely on rivers such as the Nile or on piped water rather than local precipitation. The tiny differences between them, fractions of a millimetre, highlight how close to absolute zero rainfall the driest inhabited spots on the planet really are.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Geographical / climate records
- Coverage
- 6 entities · 6 observations
- Measure
- Average Annual Rainfall (mm)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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