sk which big city is farthest from the sea and most people guess somewhere in the middle of America or Russia. The answer is in western China. Ürümqi, a city of about 4 million people, is 2,353 km from the nearest coast in a straight line, roughly the distance from London to Athens.
We measured every city in the world with a population of one million or more: 522 of them, from GeoNames' city list. For each one we took the straight-line distance from the city centre to the nearest point on the shore of an ocean, or of a sea joined to one. The full ranking, a map and a downloadable CSV are on the study page.
The top ten
Five of the top ten are in Central Asia, the one region on Earth where a city of millions can sit well over 1,500 km from salt water. Ürümqi's nearest coast is the Bay of Bengal, on the far side of the Himalayas.
The surprise is number six. Kisangani, on the Congo River, is 1,583 km from the sea: the Atlantic is a long way downstream, and the Indian Ocean is on the other side of the continent.
Of the 25 farthest, 9 are in China, 7 in Russia, 3 in Kazakhstan and 3 in DR Congo. Only 40 of the 522 cities lie more than 1,000 km inland. The farthest in the United States is Chicago, 47th, at 955 km.
What about the Caspian Sea?
The Caspian is called a sea, but it has no outlet to the ocean: it is the world's largest lake. We left it out. Counted as a sea, it would be the nearest shore for Astana, Tashkent and Tehran, and Almaty would come out about 300 km closer to "the sea". Each city's own page shows both figures.
A map error we found along the way
Building this study turned up a problem in MapGO's own data. The global coastline we use comes from OpenStreetMap, where volunteers had marked the edges of some ponds and lakes as sea coast. A pond in southern Nepal made Kathmandu look 110 km from the sea, and Rice Lake in Ontario made Chicago look 814 km from it. We checked every piece of the coastline against Natural Earth's independent map and removed about 1,400 inland fakes. We also made the calculator pick the coast that is truly nearest on the globe, not on a flat map, which had favoured coasts farther south. Chicago is now 955 km from the nearest salt water, and Kathmandu 687 km. The distance to coastline calculator and the city pages use the corrected data too.
How far is your city?
The study covers cities of a million or more. For anywhere else, the [distance to coastline calculator](https://mapgo.io/distance/distance-to-coastline) measures from any point, or from where you stand on a phone. For borders instead of coasts, see[how far cities are from each country's border.
Use the data
The CSV has all 522 cities with their population, coordinates, distance in kilometres and miles, and the nearest point on the coast. It is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
Sources: city names, points and populations from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Coastline © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), checked against Natural Earth. Every distance is a straight line, not a drive.