The world's loneliest house stuck on the side of a mountain, empty for 100 years

The property once dubbed the “world’s loneliest house” now has some competition in the isolation stakes, as pictures have emerged of a home embedded in the side of a remote Italian mountain range.

Last year it was reported that the world’s loneliest house was located near Iceland, where a home had sat empty on a small deserted island for almost 100 years.

But there’s a new level of solitary that has been revealed: the Buffa di Perrero on Monte Cristallo in the Dolomite Mountains.

The hut, which has baffled onlookers for years, is carved into the side of a sheer rock face and overlooks a sharp and deadly drop, reports the Daily Star.

It features brick walls, a roof, four framed windows, and a camping chair – but the question is, how on earth did anyone ever get anything up there?

War is believed to have been the motivator for the hut’s death-defying location, when a number of ‘bivouacs’ like Buffa di Perrero were built by Italian soldiers during World War I as a way to gain strategic advantage over approaching enemies.

A bivouac shelter is an improvised campsite or shelter, usually of a temporary nature, used especially by soldiers, backpackers or mountain climbers.

The soldiers reportedly rested and stored their gear in the bivouacs.

These days, climbers can access the hut via a mountain trail or an improvised rope ladder, but this is not a climb for the faint-hearted, nor the inexperienced, with local experts warning that the trek takes a “high level of fitness”.

The Via Ferrata, or ‘Iron Path’, has steel ladders and cables added for especially dangerous parts of the trail up to the mini structure.

There are those who have dared and, of course, posted about it on Instagram. One brave climber (as below) wrote: “This is my new bivoauc, you want to live here with me?”

It was reported by local newspaper Il Dolomiti that the hut had sadly been rendered “unusable” for climbers after the roof gave way.

Images from the mountain rescue team of Cortina d’Ampezzo show snow having come through a collapsed roof, with broken pieces of wood scattered around the floor.

Lonely or not, the Buffa di Perrero still offers incredible views of the Dolomite range.