The Oldest Houses In The World You Can Actually Live In

What is the oldest house in the world that a person could still live in today? Hi everyone, Kenton here. Hit the subscribe button, and let's count down the 10 oldest habitable houses in the world. Nearly every list that tackles this misses the point, so here are some rules for our list. A house must be standing, roofed, and livable. Maintenance and renovation are fine, since updating facades and kitchens is what keeps a building alive. Ruin is the disqualifier. If it collapsed or burned and was largely rebuilt, it is a new house wearing an older dress. So the Villas of Pompeii won't count because they are roofless shells that were buried in ash, dug back out as ruins, and largely rebuilt. Same goes for Knapp of Howar in Scotland, which dates to around 3800 BC, older than the Pyramids of Giza. But its walls stand open to the sky, and so do Skara Brae and the mud brick remains in Turkey. We're only looking at houses that have survived intact since they were built. Number 10 takes us to the foothills of Mount Sahand in northwestern Iran, where the village of Kandovan looks less like a town than a colony of giant stone beehives. Its houses are carved directly into cones of volcanic tuff, complete with hand-cut doorways, small windows, and staircases winding up through the rock. Local tradition holds that the first residents were refugees hiding from Mongol armies in the 13th century, which would give the homes roughly 700 to 800 years of continuous habitation. Some enthusiastic claims stretch its age into the thousands of years, but the late 13th or 14th century is the founding date the evidence actually supports, and even that is enough to make every home here older than the printing press. Over 100 families still live inside the cones by recent counts, which is why Kandovan is often described as the only permanently inhabited cliff village of its kind on Earth. The stone keeps the rooms cool through the summer and warm through brutal mountain winters, and because the mountain itself is the structure, there has never been anything to rebuild. If carving your home out of a mountain feels like an unfair advantage in a longevity contest, our next entry levels the field because it is made of wood. Number nine is Haas Bethlehem in Switzerland, and thanks to dendrochronology, the science of dating timber by its tree rings, we know its logs were felled in 1287. That makes the house four years older than Switzerland itself. A family lived within its timber walls continuously until 1981, nearly 700 years of habitation before the building was carefully restored and folded into the Reading Estate, where it now welcomes visitors as a museum. Its windows and porches came later, but the log core is the original 13th century structure. Several of its neighbors from the same medieval building boom are still lived in today, and Haas Bethlehem itself is frequently cited as the oldest precisely dated wooden house in Europe. Tree rings dated the Swiss house, England's oldest lived-in home was dated of all things by a cathedral. Number eight is Sultford Manor House in Somerset. In 2003, the magazine Country Life ran a nationwide search for the oldest continuously inhabited house in Britain, and Sultford took the crown. The architectural historian John Goodall placed its construction before 1150, partly because a Norman window carved with zigzag chevrons closely matches stonework at Hereford Cathedral, which was finished by that very year. Upstairs, faint 13th century wall paintings still cling to the plaster and are believed to be the oldest domestic frescoes in England. A chimney was added in the 1400s and an extension in the 1990s, which is exactly the sort of updating our rules allow. Through it all, Sultford has remained what it has always been, a private family home. It last sold in 2010 for around 1.3 million pounds, which sounds steep until you work out the price per century. As Sultford was being built, so is number seven, which stands in the American Southwest, where entire towns were already ancient when the first Europeans laid eyes on them. A Como Pueblo in New Mexico, known as Sky City, was built around 1150 on top of a sandstone mesa soaring hundreds of feet above the desert floor, a perch chosen for defense and never surrendered since. It's roughly 250 adobe and stone dwellings, some three stories tall, follow a tradition in which homes pass from mother to youngest daughter, meaning some of these houses have moved through a single family line for nearly 900 years. About a dozen households live on the mesa full time today, without electricity or running water, and on feast days, the old houses fill again as relatives return to the rock. France's answer is even older, and you can book a night in it. Number six is Demiurge de l'Apothecary, the Apothecary's House, in the town of Cluny. Tree ring analysis published in 2000 revealed that its timbers were felled in the winter of 1090-1091, earning it official recognition as the oldest dated house in France. Though the façade was updated during the Renaissance, its original beams and some interior architectural elements are all painstakingly conserved rather than rebuilt. Today it operates as a guest house, which means that for the price of a room, you can sleep beneath timbers cut from trees that sprouted in the age of the Vikings. Which actually brings us to our next house, which has hosted the same family since 1550. Number five is Vikings House, a turf-roofed timber farmhouse in the Faroe Islands whose oldest section dates to the 11th century. Tradition says its logs arrived as driftwood from Norway, which is entirely believable on a windswept archipelago with almost no trees of its own. Since 1550, the farm has been worked by the Patterson family, now in its 17th generation, and while the oldest rooms welcome visitors as a small museum, the family still lives and farms here after roughly 900 years of unbroken occupancy, the grass on the roof growing, as green as the fields around it. Vikings House is widely called the oldest continuously inhabited wooden house in the world, and no one has produced a serious challenger. We'll hop back over the pond for number four, Taos Pueblo. Its two great adobe blocks were built up between the year 1000 and 1450 and rise as high as five stories, stacked like a hand-built apartment tower of earth and straw. When Spanish explorers first saw the Pueblo in 1540, it looked very much as it does today. The adobe survives the ritual as much as engineering because every year, residents re-plastered the walls by hand with the same earth their ancestors used, a form of maintenance elevated into tradition that kept these buildings standing for close to a thousand years. Around 150 people still live in the historic structures in the traditional way, without electricity or running water, within a community recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Number three carries us back across the Atlantic to Cappadocian Central Turkey, where ancient volcanic eruptions buried the landscape and soft tuff and millions of years of erosion sculpted it into the famous fairy chimneys. From roughly the 6th through the 11th centuries, in a region that had been hollowed and tunneled since Hittite times, people carved entire homes into that stone, chiseling out bedrooms, kitchens, staples, and pigeon lofts easily as other cultures raised timber frames. Some of the grandest outcrops, including the towering castle rock, were evacuated in the 1950s when erosion made them dangerous. But scattered cave houses in the surrounding villages remain genuinely lived in, and many more have become hotels, where the room itself is roughly a thousand years older than the reservation. The Cappadocians dug downward and inward, the builders at number two went the other direction, straight up. The old city of Sana'a in Yemen contains more than 6,000 houses built before the 11th century, on a site that has been inhabited for over 2,500 years. These are tower houses, rising story upon story from stone bases through walls of rammed earth and fired brick, their earth-toned facades trimmed with white gypsum friezes as intricate as lace, and crowned with fanlights of colored glass that glows like lanterns after dark. They have been called ancestors of the skyscraper, and unlike nearly everything else this old, they are not a museum. Sana'a remains a living capital city where families cook, sleep, and raise children inside thousand-year-old walls. That survival is now under genuine threat because wars since 2014 and repeated flooding have damaged the old city and placed it on UNESCO's list of endangered heritage, a sobering reminder that houses which outlasted a millennium can still be lost in a decade. Which brings us to number one, a place where the word house barely covers what happened. The Sassi di Matera in southern Italy began as a natural cave system in a limestone ravine that had sheltered people since prehistoric times. Over thousands of years, residents carved those caves deeper, extended them outward, and dressed them with built facades until an entire city of cave homes climbed the slope, stacked so tightly that one family's street is another family's roof. UNESCO describes it as the finest intact example of a cave-dwelling settlement anywhere in the Mediterranean. However, despite its almost magical appearance, by the 1950s, conditions inside had grown so desperate, with entire families sharing single caves with their animals, that the Italian government emptied the Sassi almost completely. For two decades, the caves stood silent, but they never became ruins, and beginning in the 1980s, restoration drew people home again. UNESCO listing followed in 1993, and today, the same chambers hold apartments, restaurants, and cave hotels with Wi-Fi and heated floors. As a near-continuous line of human dwelling, from firelight to fire sticks, Matera may have no equal anywhere on Earth. Look back across this list, and one pattern stands out. Not a single one of these houses has survived by being sealed behind glass. They endured because someone kept living in them, patching the roof, sweeping the floors, tending the walls each spring. It turns out the greatest preservation technology ever invented is a family that refuses to leave. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Did anything about this list surprise you? Let me know down below in the comment section. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to our channel members for making this video possible. If you would like to support our research and the production of these videos, join our membership program today. As always, thank you all for watching, and I'll see you next time on This House.