A small village in Sardinia may be the next blue zone, with residents living past 100 at about 11 times the U.S. average through walking, beans, and tight community ties.
In Bolotana, a modest community on the Italian island of Sardinia, 10 of 2,262 residents were at least 100 years old in a 2024 snapshot. National Geographic researchers flag that rate as roughly 10 times the Sardinian average and 11 times the U.S. average.
Fox News reported that an international team, including Blue Zones founder and National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner, examined the village’s longevity patterns. Findings appeared in Frontiers in Aging. The study did not claim the habits directly cause longer life.
Still, the patterns are hard to ignore. Bolotana’s women ranked second only to Hong Kong for life expectancy at age 70 and for survival from 70 to 100. Researchers see a candidate “blue zone”, a place where extreme longevity clusters far beyond normal odds.
The original Sardinian blue zone, identified in the late 1990s and described in research around 2000, sits in the mountains about 68 miles from Bolotana. That earlier zone was known for strong male longevity. Bolotana’s edge shows up more clearly among women.
Buettner said demographers dug into birth, death, and baptismal records to verify the ages.
"The international team of demographers, their population scientists... were able to examine the birth records, death records and baptismal records and see that this is probably the richest, most complete data on centenarians in the world,"
he said. The paper trail matters. Longevity claims collapse without clean records. Here, the documentation is unusually deep.
Buettner put the practical stakes plainly for anyone hoping to reach old age in good health.
"For those of us who want to make it into our 90s and 100s in full health, this place does it better than anyplace else in the world."
In the highland blue zone, Buettner said, women carried most of the household strain, money worries, children, the leaky roof, while aging alone more often. Bolotana looks different.
"Here, men are participating more, and that could explain why women are doing better, because they're only bearing half the stress load instead of almost all of it," he said. The point is not a slogan. It is a daily division of labor that keeps isolation from crushing the oldest residents.
Women gather in the library, bake bread, make sweets, and go to church together. Buettner called the women’s social web stronger than what his team has seen in other blue zones.
Centenarians Salvatore and Nina spend time socializing each day. Buettner framed the habit as medicine without the bottle.
"It’s a sense of community, but it's also people proactively understanding that sitting down with a friend and talking about your troubles and your day with somebody who cares about you is a much more powerful drug than a pharmaceutical,"
he said. "The human species has shown this over and over, and Bolotana is a perfect example."
Diet in Bolotana is not a boutique wellness plan. About 90% of a centenarian’s diet has been plant-based, Buettner said. Residents traditionally ate meat about five times a month.
"Not protein, by the way. These aren't protein loaders. These are complex carbohydrate loaders," he said. Beans sit at the center, garbanzo, lentil, pinto, cannellini. He called them the all-stars of the local longevity diet.
Buettner prepared traditional minestrone with resident Anna Maria Filia. Giaccomo Nieddu keeps an ancient olive grove; the oil is under study for unusually high levels of odd-chain fatty acids. None of this is framed as a miracle product. It is ordinary food grown and cooked close to home.
The third habit is steady, low-drama walking built into daily life. Buettner contrasted it with the American gym obligation.
"It’s this sort of unconscious walking that’s far more important for longevity than going to the gym."
He tied the same idea to U.S. life expectancy. Residents of walkable American communities hold a three- to five-year advantage over people in less-walkable places, he said. The fix he described is not another personal resolution. It is the shape of streets and towns that make movement automatic.
"If we want a healthier America, we have to start thinking about shaping our neighborhoods and our cities so people can unconsciously move and not rely on heaping another obligation on their busy lives to remember to go to the gym," Buettner said.
He rejected the idea that Bolotana’s oldest residents are genetic outliers or iron-willed exception cases.
"These are real humans with an average set of genes. These aren’t superhumans with superhuman discipline or better genes. They’re not chasing longevity. It is the product of their environment."
Most of what supports long life there, he added, is pleasant. The path itself is not a grind.
Researchers are still weighing how environment and tradition fit together. The Frontiers in Aging work did not prove direct cause and effect from any single habit. What it did document is a village where extreme old age is visible in the census math, the church records, and the daily routine.
Plant-heavy plates. Shared work and real friendship. Walking that happens because the place demands it. None of that requires a federal program, a celebrity protocol, or a subscription box. It requires a culture that still expects people to show up for one another and move through their day on their feet.
Long life here is not a product launch. It is what happens when ordinary habits, intact families, and walkable towns still do the quiet work elites keep trying to replace.
