In this paper we examine the interplay between recurrence properties and the shadowing property in dynamical systems on compact metric spaces. In particular, we demonstrate that if the dynamical system (X, f ) has shadowing, then it is recurrent if and only if it is minimal. Furthermore, we show that a uniformly rigid system (X, f ) has shadowing if and only if X is totally disconnected and use this to demonstrate the existence of a space X for which no surjective system (X, f ) has shadowing. We further refine these results to discuss the dynamics that can occur in spaces with compact space of self-maps.