In the United States, I’d probably name Oregon City, the famous end of the Oregon Trail and the first city founded west of the Rocky Mountains during the pioneer era. Its population is only 37,000.
Well, Brazil is such a huge country and there are lots of smallest cities with still huge population.
Unfornately i would have to say that the smallest one and most famous would probably be because of some recent disaster and one I can remember is Brumadinho. Less than 40k people, a city destroyed after a dam collapsed and a lot of mud flooded everywhere, 5 years ago
Fucking, Austria. Population of around 100 People. They renamed it to Fugging a few years ago
Ramstein, population ~5600
Famous for the Ramstein Air base, the bombing of the air base, the Ramstein air show disaster and the band named after all of that.
I went to school on base, grades 1-4, mid 1960s. My takeaway: planes with Ramjets!
For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)
This is probably the most iconic for sure.
A good number of these are examples where most people don’t actually know that the name comes from a town. I feel like they shouldn’t count.
In the Netherlands is probably Giethoorn, the ‘Venice of the North’ which has many canals instead of roads and is very touristy. It has 2.900 inhabitants
Chornobyl, Ukraine. “50 thousand people used to live here, now it’s a ghost town”
There are many more ghost towns now, due to the war. Adviivka, Bakhmut and many others, some small, some relatively big. Everyone has heard of those small cities.
Pretty sure that quote refers to Prypiat. Chornobyl had around 14k people living at the moment of the evacuation, according to wikipedia
I was under the impression that Pripyat was the town?
Yeah, the town mentioned in the quote is, in fact, Pripyat, my bad. Still, Chornobyl is another Ghost town and the exclusion Zone is named after it, so it’s the town people recognise more.
For foreigners, probably Abbottabad (population: 275,890) due to being the site of Osama Bin Laden’s compound.
For Pakistanis themselves, it’s a bit harder to determine, as I’m not able to find reliable population statistics for smaller settlements. However, some contenders are probably Nathia Gali, Chitral, Skardu and Ziarat. All of these towns are in the northern mountainous regions of Pakistan, which don’t have as much population density as e.g. the plains of Punjab. They’re also fairly popular tourist destinations for Pakistanis who want to take a break from the heat. Ziarat could be especially famous, as Muhammad Ali Jinnah (founder of Pakistan) spent some of his last days in a cottage there. It even appears on the 100-rupee note.
For France it’s probably Vichy, infamously well known internationally for being the capital of the French pro-Nazi government during the Occupation. Only 25’000 inhabitants.
Chamonix of also a good contender with a population of 9000 habitants
Mont Saint-Michel, pop. 25
Also consider that Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, of cheese fame, has 528 inhabitants.
I didn’t thought of that, you’re right!
Nice one, didn’t think of that ! I suggested the one-letter town Y (population : 89), which is obviously much less well-known, but is also much smaller.
Edit : just realised, the airport city Roissy-en-France at under 3k inhabitants is a huge contender too that wasn’t mentioned
Even without considering cheese villages (somebody mentioned Roquefort, I was thinking of Gruyere, France clocking in at about 100 inhabitants), I believe Verdun would be just as known and is smaller at a population of around 17000.
Admittedly my WW2 history knowledge is quite lacking, but I don’t recognise Vichy because of the war stuff.
But I do recognise Vichy! Because we have a sub-type of mineral water in Sweden that is named after Vichy, “Vichyvatten”. Wikipedia tells me the original was from a spring near Vichy, hence the name.
The two facts are linked: Vichy was chosen as the new capital after the occupation of Paris because of the springs. There were a lot of hotels and means of communication because of the luxurious spas.
Germany:
Bielefeld. Everyone recognizes the name, it’s marked on all maps, officially it has a football club.
But in reality, it doesn’t even exist.The village “Wacken” is well known in Germany because they hold one of the worlds largest anual Heavy-Metal festivals. They have a population of around 2000, the festival regularly attracts around 80,000 people.
Schengen - the village in Luxembourg where the Schengen Agreement was signed. The population was 5196 in 2023 (appears to be the last census quoted on Wikipedia) and the “Schengen Area”, covered by the agreement represents 450m people.
That’s a great one!
I didn’t even know there were multiple villages in Luxembourg. I kinda thought it was a city-state.
I thought so too before moving here, but there’s two cities, and a lot of empty space (in the north in particular) with lots of towns and villages, it’s not like Monaco or the Vatican City in that regard.
That being said, it’s still all very close together, you can drive from the northern most point to the south in about 1.5-2 hours.
The funniest thing I’ve learned about the geography is that there is a North/South divide where people from either don’t trust people from the other.
That is funny!
What do you consider small? A lot of people know Cupertino California because Apple are based there, but it’s only got a population of 57k. It’s arguably more recognizable than the closest major city (San Jose), which has a population of nearly 1 million.
Yeah, no Tim, nobody’s ever sung a song about getting to Cupertino
San Jose metro area is enormous though. For example I’d consider Gilroy (which is famous for its garlic) as being completely separate from San Jose even though it’s well within San Jose’s metro area.
Not my country, but what immediately came to mind was one that has global name recognition, and minimal population: Chernobyl.
It used to have around 12,000 population, but now it’s technically illegal to live nearby, and up to 150 people are estimated to live there today. It’s famous for being toxically irradiated as a result of the worst nuclear disaster in human history
Wąchock in Poland, (in)famous for being the place where tons of jokes happen, population around 2800.
Also Jeruzal, though known under its fictional name of Wilkowyje, the place where famous TV show “Ranczo” was made, population around 340.
