From a rocky cave hideaway to a remote yurt in British Columbia, we’ve found the very best places on earth to truly disappear

Words: Anna Hart

Achieving total switch off is a rare and valuable thing. Rare because we are always connected. Be it Twitter, Google searches or an endlessly replenished work inbox (one in three women still check their emails on holiday). And valuable because achieving a true downshift is more enriching for the soul than a thousand online shops.

Travel and escapism have long gone hand-in-hand, but for a generation bombarded with stress-inducing distractions, travel plays an even more vital role: to give us a significant enough break so that we can lie back, let thoughts drift, reshuffle priorities, and bring home new interests and habits.

For this to happen organically, your holiday destination matters more than ever. A place that’s truly off-grid, under-the-radar or geographically remote – somewhere you haven’t seen peppered on friends’ Instagram feeds. Nor is it merely about physical distance; it’s a state of mind that can be achieved much closer to home – on a car free Mediterranean island where life is simple, in a no-wifi yurt that transports us back in time, or among the rugged scenery of an uninhabited Irish archipelago. In today’s hyper-connected world, our surroundings need to work that bit harder in order to deliver, because we sure are…

Discover your very own hideaway in one of these 10 remote destinations