Surely, those citizens would say, such villages are completely cut off from the outside world, isolated completely from everyone else, a sort of ‘floating island in the sea’, backwards and underdeveloped.
Definitely, they’d say, a hidden village is a place that normal people would be fools to want to visit, and on top of that, somewhere you could only find with great difficulty. A ‘hidden shinobi village’ was unmistakably that kind of place.