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There’s one island on this countdown that even a real estate mogul couldn’t get past the government to buy.
A rundown of islands currently sitting on the market — some dirt cheap, some crawling with venomous snakes, one allegedly soaked in the ash of plague victims — and the common thread is that buyers keep walking away. Leading the pack is Poveglia, a 17-acre speck in the Venetian Lagoon that Italy has tried and failed to offload for years. The rest of the list ranges from a Cold War bioweapons site in the Aral Sea to a snake-infested rock off the coast of Brazil that’s simply illegal to set foot on.
- In April 2014, Italy’s state property agency, Demanio, put a 99-year lease on Poveglia Island up for public auction to help chip away at national debt.
- Venetian businessman Luigi Brugnaro bid roughly €513,000 for the lease, and the government rejected it as too low, leaving the island unsold.
- Poveglia served as a plague quarantine site starting in the 18th century, with an estimated 100,000-plus victims buried or cremated there before it became a psychiatric hospital that closed in 1968.
The Island Nobody Will Take
Poveglia sits within sight of Venice, close enough that boat tours point it out from a distance, yet close to nobody has set foot on it in decades. During outbreaks of the Black Death and later bubonic plague waves, the island functioned as a lazaretto — a strict quarantine station where the sick were shipped in and, in enormous numbers, never shipped back out. Local lore holds that the soil itself carries a heavy concentration of human ash from mass cremations, a claim that has followed the island into nearly every documentary and countdown video made about it since.
The 20th century didn’t do much for its reputation either. A long-term care and psychiatric facility operated there until 1968, and the stories that grew up around it — a superintendent supposedly running unethical procedures on patients before falling or jumping from the bell tower — have hardened into local legend, unverifiable but repeated often enough that they’re now baked into the island’s identity as “the world’s most haunted island.”
An estimated 100,000 plague victims were buried on a 17-acre island that Italy still can’t get anyone to pay for.
The €513,000 Bid That Fell Short
Demanio’s 2014 auction wasn’t a giveaway — it was a debt-reduction play, with officials hoping a private developer would sink money into a boutique resort on land that otherwise generates nothing. Luigi Brugnaro, who would later become mayor of Venice, put in a bid around €513,000 for the 99-year lease. The government turned it down as insufficient, and no other offer materialized that changed the outcome. Poveglia stayed exactly where it had been for half a century: uninhabited, off-limits to tourists, and unsold, its history doing more to scare off developers than any zoning issue ever could. For a broader look at how Italy handles cheap and unwanted real estate, the country’s $1 homes program shows the same instinct to dump distressed property on anyone willing to take the risk.
The Rest of the Ghost Fleet
Poveglia tops the list, but it’s far from the only property with a body count attached. Okunoshima, Japan’s so-called Rabbit Island, was a secret chemical warfare research site during World War II before it became a tourist novelty. Gaiola Island off Naples carries a curse reputation strong enough that it’s sat abandoned for decades, and Rattlesnake Island in Lake Erie is said to be cursed by the Seneca people who once lived nearby.
Then there’s Ilha da Queimada Grande in Brazil, home to the golden lancehead viper and so dangerous the Brazilian navy restricts access entirely, and Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, a former Soviet biological weapons testing ground still considered too contaminated for casual visitors. Hart Island in Long Island Sound holds a mass grave with more than a million burials, and Sable Island off Nova Scotia has earned the nickname “graveyard of the Atlantic” from centuries of shipwrecks. Anyone drawn to the idea of owning a remote, isolated landmass without the body count might get more out of watching how people actually live on the smallest island in the Caribbean or a remote visa-free island at the top of the world.
Poveglia remains the headline act of the group for a simple reason: it’s the one closest to a major tourist hub, the one with an actual failed auction and a documented six-figure bid on record, and the one where the plague math — over 100,000 dead on 17 acres — is hard to shake off once you hear it. Nobody’s bought it yet, and as of this writing, nobody’s tried since Brugnaro walked away in 2014.
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