What's the world's least populated nice spot?

Most of the better places on earth are pretty full. What isn't?

A fellow named Tom Forth has a fun website called Population Around a Point where you can specify any spot on the globe and he’ll tell you how many people live within X kilometers of it. I decided to use a circle with a 100km radius (in other words, a circle 124 miles in diameter — that’s about the distance between Santa Monica and Palm Springs).

Some places in Asia, of course, have vast populations within these circles, such as over 66 million in the Hong Kong-Macau-Canton megalopolis:

Jakarta, Indonesia is the center of 60 million people, despite some of the circle being ocean:

Cairo is close to 65 million.

But those are giant cities, of course.

Here’s a region in northern India along the Ganges that squeezes 60 million into a mostly rural area where the biggest city appears to be Patna (in Bihar state). Patna is the 19th biggest city in India, but I must confess to never having heard of it:

They don’t call it the Deep North of India for nothing.

In Europe, London-Birmingham is up close to 24 million, but in general, Europe isn’t that densely populated on this scale. Among the big inland cities, Moscow is just over 20 million and Paris is a little below 15 million. But Europe, Western Europe in particular, tends to have complicated geography, both natural and political, that impedes the formation of megalopolises.

In the Americas, Mexico City is up around 31 million and Sao Paulo and its hinterland (not counting Rio, which is further away) is too.

In the U.S., the New York City-Philadelphia circle peaks out at around 24 million and the Southern California circle at around 18 million. Chicago-Milwaukee and San Francisco-San Jose-Sacramento are around 11 million.

At the other end of the scale, what are some nice pieces of real estate for human habitation that are relatively underpopulated? I look for good climate, scenery, enough level land to be habitable, reasonably close to economic opportunities, and some opportunity to have or bring in enough water (perhaps desalination using solar power in the future?).

I’ll put my first idea below the paywall.