Where to live in Satun.

The provincial capital sits in Phiman subdistrict of Mueang Satun, a few kilometres inland from the Andaman coast, and it is the only town municipality in the whole province — the other six municipalities are subdistrict-level and everything else is run by one of thirty-four subdistrict administrative organisations. Everything institutional is here: Satun Hospital, the provincial administration, the banks and markets, the immigration office and the courts. The town also carries the visible evidence of the province's unusual history. Kuden Mansion, built at the turn of the twentieth century as the residence of the last ruler of what was then the Malay state of Setul and now the Satun National Museum, is a Sino-European building in a town whose population is more than three-quarters Muslim; the central mosque stands a short walk away. It is a small, low-rise, easy-going place — the provincial motto is literally "peaceful, clean, pure nature" — and it is the only part of Satun where you can live without a vehicle. Housing is rooms above shophouses, small owner-run apartment blocks and townhouses.

Drive about eight kilometres south of the capital and the town gives out into mangrove creek and then into the Strait of Malacca. Tammalang pier is the reason to know this stretch: it is Satun's international sea gate, with scheduled crossings to Kuah on Langkawi — a run of roughly an hour and a quarter on the fast boats — and to Kuala Perlis on the Malaysian mainland. For a foreigner living in the province that is a genuinely unusual asset, because it puts an international airport, a duty-free island and a second country inside a morning's travel from a town with no airport of its own. Immigration is processed at the pier. Offshore from here lies Ko Sarai, a subdistrict of Mueang Satun made up of three island groups totalling 243 square kilometres with a population recorded at 5,077 in 2012, living on fishing, farming and tourism; the largest village, Ban Ko Sarai, sits on a thirteen-square-kilometre island of the same name. On the mainland side, housing is houses and townhouses let by their owners, generally with a garden and parking, and the trade-off is honest: you are close to the water and the ferry, and ten to fifteen minutes from the hospital.

La-ngu, about sixty kilometres northwest of the capital, is the province's other real town, and Pak Bara on its coast is the door to everything Satun is famous for. Speedboats and ferries leave the pier for Ko Tarutao, Ko Bulon Le and Ko Lipe; the Mu Ko Phetra National Park headquarters is here; and the coastline running north into Trang is part of the Satun UNESCO Global Geopark, whose four districts are La-ngu, Thung Wa, Manang and part of Mueang Satun. La-ngu's history explains its size: it was originally only a minor district, and was promoted to full district status in 1930 when pepper production collapsed in Thung Wa and the two swapped rank. Pak Bara is also the site of the deep-seaport that was planned here for years and never built, in the face of sustained local opposition — worth knowing, because land in this district has been sold on that story more than once. Housing splits in two: ordinary owner-let houses and townhouses in and around La-ngu town, and tourist-facing bungalow and guesthouse stock near the pier that is built for nightly rates and can often be negotiated monthly in the May-to-October low season.

Tarutao National Marine Park was declared on 19 April 1974 — Thailand's second marine national park — and covers roughly 1,490 square kilometres and 51 islands in two groups: the Tarutao group to the east, and the Adang–Rawi group about fifty kilometres west, near the Malaysian maritime border. Ko Tarutao itself is the biggest island in the province at 163 square kilometres and is best known for the political prison camp that operated there in the 1930s and 1940s; it has park accommodation and essentially no private housing. The place people actually live is Ko Lipe, a small island on the southern edge of the Adang–Rawi group, settled well over a century ago by Urak Lawoi sea people and now home to a resident Urak Lawoi population of roughly nine hundred alongside a tourism economy of guesthouses, dive shops and beach bars. It is the only place in Satun with a year-round foreign presence — and it inverts the province's entire cost ranking. Everything arrives by boat, power and water are island-scale, salt air eats fixtures, and any room has a high-season nightly value between November and April, so a long let costs multiples of the mainland. Score it ten for water access and three for infrastructure and accept that a composite number is the wrong tool for it. Practical notes: there are no cars, the ferry timetable thins sharply in the monsoon, and serious medical care means a boat and then a road.

Behind the coast, Satun climbs into limestone. The Nakawan Range forms the border with Perlis in Malaysia, the Nakhon Si Thammarat range separates the province from Songkhla, and between them sit the five inland districts — Khuan Don and Khuan Kalong, Tha Phae, Manang and Thung Wa — carved out of Mueang Satun and each other between 1969 and 1996. Forest covers 1,212 square kilometres of the province, 40.1 per cent, and most of it is here. Thale Ban National Park, established on 27 October 1980 across 196 square kilometres of Khuan Don and Mueang Satun, is a freshwater swamp and rainforest reserve that runs straight into Malaysia's Taman Negeri Perlis on the other side of the ridge; the Wang Prachan checkpoint, known on the Malaysian side as Wang Kelian, crosses the border in the same district. This interior is also the heart of the geology that earned Satun Thailand's first UNESCO Global Geopark in 2018: caves, karst and some of the richest early-Palaeozoic fossil beds in Southeast Asia, with altitudes reaching 732 metres. Housing is village houses, rubber-smallholding compounds and the occasional townhouse in a district town, let directly by owners and almost never listed online. It is the cheapest part of the province by a clear margin, and the drive to Satun Hospital is the number that decides whether it works for you.