¿Dónde Están Lugares a Los Que Nunca Hemos Ido?
By Someone Who’s Spent Too Much Time Thinking About This
So I’m sitting in a Denny’s at 2 AM last Thursday – don’t ask why, long story involving a cancelled flight and poor life choices – and I start wondering about all these lugares a los que nunca hemos ido. Not like, Mars or whatever. I mean places right here on Earth that basically nobody’s ever actually been to.
And before you come at me with «well actually, explorers have mapped everything» – have they though? Have they really?
That Weird Gap in Your Own Neighborhood
Here’s something that’ll mess with your head: there’s probably a building within five miles of where you’re sitting right now that you’ve never been inside. Maybe it’s that industrial complex off the highway that’s been there your whole life. Or that house on the corner with the overgrown yard where you’ve literally never seen a person enter or exit.
My cousin Jake – works in HVAC, been doing it for like 15 years – tells me he goes into maybe 3-4 houses every week that the owners haven’t fully explored. Crawl spaces that haven’t been entered since the 70s. Attic spaces sealed off during renovations. He found a whole room in a Victorian in Portland once that had been drywalled over. Just… there. Forgotten.
That’s local lugares a los que nunca hemos ido right in your backyard.
The Ocean Floor is Basically Cheating But Whatever
Okay yeah, everyone knows we’ve explored more of space than the ocean floor. That stat gets passed around at parties by guys wearing Patagonia vests who listen to too many podcasts (I’m one of them, no judgment).
But can we talk about how weird that actually is?
There’s this trench – Challenger Deep in the Mariana – that’s been visited by humans exactly three times. THREE. There are Starbucks locations that get more traffic in an hour. James Cameron went down there in 2012 for that documentary nobody watched, and before that it was 1960, and then someone went again in 2019.
That’s it. That’s the list.
Meanwhile there’s probably parts of the Mariana Trench that no human eye has ever seen, not even on camera, and it’s RIGHT THERE. On our planet. The same one where we’ve got Street View of basically every road in Nebraska.
The math doesn’t math.
North Sentinel Island and Other «Please Don’t Go There» Vibes
You know what’s wild? There’s an island in the Indian Ocean where the people have explicitly said «leave us alone» for basically all of recorded history, and we’ve… mostly respected it? The Sentinelese have been doing their thing on North Sentinel Island for somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 years (nobody knows exactly because, you know, they don’t let researchers measure stuff).
India’s government has a 3-mile exclusion zone around the whole island.
So that’s a whole place – 23 square miles of it – that’s basically off-limits to the entire modern world. There’s probably individual trees on that island that no outsider has ever seen. Beaches that exist in a basically pre-contact state.
I saw this documentary once (might’ve been Vice? everything was Vice in like 2015) where they interviewed a fisherman who’d gotten blown off course near the island, and he described seeing smoke from cooking fires and hearing sounds he couldn’t identify. That’s it. That’s as much as we know about huge chunks of that place.
Compare that to the fact that I can pull up satellite images of your house right now from three different angles, and it gets pretty existential pretty fast.
The Bureaucratic Lugares Nobody Thinks About
Here’s where it gets really weird though.
There are places that are technically accessible but functionally might as well not exist because of paperwork. I’m talking about:
The Vatican Secret Archives – excuse me, they rebranded to «Apostolic Archives» in 2019 because «secret» was giving people ideas – but yeah, 53 miles of shelving with documents going back 1200 years. Scholars can request specific documents if they know what they’re looking for, but nobody’s just browsing. There’s stuff in there that hasn’t been read since it was filed.
Room 39 in North Korea – probably. Maybe. Nobody really knows if it exists as described, which kind of proves my point? It’s supposedly this organization that manages slush funds for the Kim family, but «where it is» is basically «somewhere in Pyongyang, we think, allegedly.»
The Royal Archives in London – parts of it, anyway. They opened up a bunch of stuff in 2020, but there’s still collections that are restricted for various reasons involving national security or family privacy or «because we said so.»
My friend Sarah’s a historian (specializes in Tudor England, which is somehow even more dramatic than current politics) and she says the frustrating thing isn’t what’s sealed – it’s that you often don’t know what’s sealed. The catalog will just have a gap. «Records from 1547, then nothing until 1549, don’t worry about it.»
The Mundane Lugares That Haunt Me Personally
Can I be real with you for a second?
The lugares a los que nunca hemos ido that actually keep me up at night aren’t the exotic ones. They’re stupid stuff like:
- The apartment I almost rented in 2016 but didn’t because the landlord seemed sketchy. I drive past that building sometimes and wonder what my life would’ve looked like in that other timeline. That’s a place I’ll never go now, in a metaphysical sense.
- My grandfather’s childhood home in Ohio that got demolished in the 80s to build a strip mall. There’s a Panera there now. I’ve been to the Panera. But I’ll never see what he saw when he was seven years old looking out his bedroom window. That place doesn’t exist anymore.
- The coffee shop in Seattle where my parents supposedly had their first date. My mom thinks it was on Capitol Hill. My dad insists it was in Fremont. One of them is right, which means there’s a real location out there that I could theoretically visit, but I’ll never know for sure which one it is, so in a way I can’t really go there. Schrodinger’s coffee shop.
This is getting too philosophical. Let me reel it back in.
Places That Straight Up Don’t Want Visitors
There’s a category of lugares that are actively hostile to human presence, which is metal as hell when you think about it:
The Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl – okay yes, tourists can visit parts of it now on guided tours (I have a coworker who did this and won’t shut up about it, hi Mark if you’re reading this). But there’s a 30km zone where the radiation is still bad enough that you legally cannot enter, and within that there are hotspots where you’d be dead in hours. The basement of the hospital in Pripyat where the firefighters’ gear is still stored? Yeah, that’s a 50,000 roentgen situation. Nobody’s going in there without a death wish.
Snake Island (Ilha da Queimada Grande) – off the coast of Brazil, closed to the public because it has the highest concentration of venomous snakes in the world. There’s like one or five snakes per square meter depending on which source you believe (I’ve seen both numbers). The Brazilian navy goes there occasionally to maintain the lighthouse, and that’s it. The ecosystem evolved in isolation and now it’s too dangerous for humans.
Heard Island – this Australian territory in the southern Indian Ocean that’s basically «what if Antarctica but volcanic?» Gets maybe one or two scientific expeditions per decade. The weather’s too brutal for regular visits. There are probably penguin colonies there that have never encountered a human being.
The Digital Lugares Nobody Talks About
Okay, pivot time: what about places in the digital realm?
I’m not talking about the dark web or whatever (that’s been so over-hyped by TV shows that my aunt thinks Bitcoin is only for criminals). I mean like:
- Dead MMO servers that got shut down. There were whole cities in Star Wars Galaxies before they closed the servers in 2011. Places that thousands of people had visited, that had their own culture and history, and now they just… don’t exist. Can’t be visited. Gone.
- Deleted YouTube videos. There’s this phenomenon where you’ll see a playlist with [Video Unavailable] in the middle, and you’ll never know what it was. Could’ve been someone’s masterpiece. Could’ve been garbage. It’s a place in cultural memory that nobody can return to.
- The original code for huge chunks of early internet stuff. Websites from the 90s that didn’t get archived. MySpace before the «update» that deleted like 50 million songs. That’s all lugares a los que nunca hemos ido in the sense that you can’t go back there now.
The Philosophical Bit That’s Gonna Sound Pretentious
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: every moment creates lugares we’ll never visit.
That party you didn’t go to last weekend? That timeline where you went is now a place you’ll never be able to access. The conversation that would’ve happened doesn’t exist in this version of reality.
Every book you don’t read contains a mental landscape you’ll never explore. Every language you don’t learn has concepts and ideas that won’t fully translate, places in human thought that are closed off to you.
I know, I know – I’m being That Guy at the Denny’s now, getting deep about it. But seriously though.
My partner and I were talking about this (she thinks I think about weird stuff too much, she’s not wrong), and she pointed out that every person contains their own interior world that nobody else can fully access. Like, I’ll never know what it’s actually feels like to be you, seeing through your eyes, with your specific memories and associations. That’s a place I fundamentally cannot go.
That got dark. Let me bring it back.
The Lugares That’ll Open Up (Maybe)
Some places that are currently lugares a los que nunca hemos ido might not be forever:
Antarctica’s Subglacial Lakes – there’s liquid water under the ice, whole ecosystems that have been isolated for millions of years. Scientists have barely scratched the surface (literally). Lake Vostok is the size of Lake Ontario and has been sealed under ice for 15 million years. They’ve drilled into it but haven’t really explored it yet because of contamination concerns.
Cave Systems We Haven’t Found Yet – new caves get discovered pretty regularly. Son Doong in Vietnam – currently the world’s largest cave – wasn’t found until 1991 and wasn’t properly explored until 2009. It has its own river, jungle, and weather system. If that can stay hidden until 2009, what else is out there?
The Deep Biosphere – there are bacteria living miles below the Earth’s surface in solid rock, and we’ve barely begun to catalog what’s down there. These aren’t places you can «visit» in the traditional sense, but they’re environments that we’ve only just started to prove exist.
Why This All Matters (Or Doesn’t)
Look, I started writing this because I couldn’t sleep after that Denny’s incident (the coffee was a mistake), but the more I think about lugares a los que nunca hemos ido, the more I realize it’s actually kind of… comforting?
We live in an age where you can Google literally anything. Where every restaurant has been reviewed, every trail has GPS coordinates, every tourist destination has a thousand identical Instagram photos. There’s something genuinely reassuring about the fact that mystery still exists. That there are places – physical, digital, metaphorical – that nobody’s fully catalogued yet.
It means exploration isn’t dead. Discovery is still possible. The map isn’t complete.
Or maybe I’m just romanticizing it because I spent too much time reading adventure books as a kid. Could be that too.
The Answer to the Original Question
So: ¿Dónde están lugares a los que nunca hemos ido?
They’re at the bottom of the ocean and the tops of mountains nobody’s bothered to climb. They’re in sealed archives and demolished buildings. They’re in conversations we didn’t have and decisions we didn’t make. They’re three blocks from your house and three miles below your feet.
They’re everywhere, basically.
And honestly? That’s the best answer I can give you at 4 AM in a Denny’s parking lot, writing this on my phone because the laptop died two hours ago and I’m too wired to care anymore.
If you’re still reading this, thanks for indulging my rambling. Go visit a new place this week, even if it’s just a street in your town you’ve never walked down. Add one less item to the list of lugares a los que nunca hemos ido.
Or don’t. I’m not your boss.