10 Abandoned Places In The World And Their Stories

Some places refuse to be forgotten even after every person has left them. I have walked through abandoned streets where the silence felt alive, stood in rooms still furnished with the last meal someone never finished, and felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. This is not a list compiled from a search engine. These are places I researched with the intent to understand and, where possible, to see with my own eyes.

Abandoned places in the world carry a weight that ordinary travel destinations rarely match. The history behind each one is not dusty or distant. It is immediate. You stand inside the consequence of war, industrial greed, natural disaster, or political failure, and you feel it on your skin. I have been drawn to these places for years, first through photographs that made me stop mid-scroll, and then through a genuine need to understand what actually happened in each one and why the ruins were left standing rather than cleared away.

In putting this together I focused only on places where the abandonment itself tells a story worth knowing. Each section below contains the factual history of the place, what you find there physically today, how accessible it is, and what I personally make of its significance. I have deliberately avoided the two things that make most articles on this topic worthless: vague atmosphere writing that tells you nothing, and recycled facts copied from Wikipedia without any original thought added. Everything here is as accurate and detailed as I could make it.

1. Pripyat, Ukraine

Pripyat is not the most dramatic place I have ever read about. It is the most honest. Everything that happened there happened openly, and the city still carries the evidence in every crumbling corridor and overgrown courtyard. It was built in 1970 specifically to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located less than two kilometers away. By the mid-1980s it had grown into a proper Soviet-model city with 49,000 residents, 15 primary schools, 5 secondary schools, 25 stores, 10 gymnasiums, 3 indoor swimming pools, 2 stadiums and a brand-new amusement park that was scheduled to open for May Day celebrations in May 1986. It never opened.

At 1:23 in the morning on April 26, 1986, Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl complex exploded during a safety test. The explosion was not immediately characterized as catastrophic to the public. Pripyat residents noticed a red glow on the horizon but were not warned. Children went to school the following morning. People went to work. Some curious residents walked to the railway bridge nearby to watch the fire, later nicknamed the Bridge of Death because of the radiation doses those observers reportedly received. It was not until 36 hours after the explosion that the evacuation order came. Residents were told to take belongings for three days. Most left everything behind. They never came back.

What makes Pripyat remarkable as an abandoned place is the specific texture of the objects left behind. Toys on classroom floors. Uniforms still hanging in the Chernobyl plant laundry. Personal photographs left in apartments. Piano keyboards going mouldy in the cultural centre. The amusement park Ferris wheel, which became the global symbol of the disaster, was never once ridden. It was assembled, scheduled for the May Day opening, and then the city emptied before anyone could climb in.

What the exclusion zone looks like today

Nearly 40 years have passed since the evacuation. More than 70 percent of Pripyat's buildings are now in a state of structural disrepair. Nature reclaimed the city faster than anyone anticipated. Birch trees have grown through apartment floors. Wolves, deer, wild boar, foxes and lynx have colonised the exclusion zone. The paradox of Chernobyl is that by removing humans entirely, the surrounding ecosystem actually recovered. Scientists now study the exclusion zone as a de facto nature reserve, watching what happens when an area of European forest is left untouched for half a century.

Radiation in the soil remains elevated, particularly caesium-137, which has been detected in cow's milk and in wild berries and mushrooms gathered from the zone. Full radiation safety is not expected for somewhere between 210 and 500 years depending on which isotopes you are measuring. However, short visits from tourists are now considered safe when managed properly. Licensed tour operators run day trips from Kyiv that include dosimeter readings throughout. The Chernobyl plant itself received a new containment structure in 2016, the New Safe Confinement, which was engineered to last 100 years.

I find Pripyat significant not because it is creepy, though it is, but because it is one of the few places in the world where the full cost of a particular kind of institutional dishonesty is still physically present. The Soviet government delayed the evacuation. Officials downplayed the danger to avoid panic. The people of Pripyat paid for that delay with their homes, their health, and in many cases their lives. The abandoned city is what a lie of that magnitude looks like after four decades.

2. Hashima Island, Japan

Hashima Island sits nine miles off the coast of Nagasaki in southern Japan, and from a distance it looks like a warship riding the water. That is exactly where the nickname Gunkanjima, Battleship Island, comes from. The silhouette is unmistakable: a dense mass of crumbling concrete towers surrounded by a perimeter seawall, rising from the East China Sea with nothing soft about it. It is a 16-acre rock that was at one point the most densely populated place on Earth.

The island was first settled in 1887 when underwater coal deposits were discovered offshore. Mitsubishi bought the island in 1890 and began constructing what would become a self-contained industrial city on the rock. Because space was impossibly limited, Mitsubishi built upward, creating some of the world's first reinforced concrete multi-storey apartment buildings in the early 20th century. By the 1950s the island held over 5,200 residents crammed into those concrete towers, along with a school, a hospital, a cinema, a pachinko parlour, a rooftop garden and a Buddhist temple. Workers mined coal from seams running 300 to 600 meters below the sea floor through tunnels that connected directly to the island's base.

The working conditions were brutal, particularly during World War II when Mitsubishi used forced labour. Historians and Korean advocacy groups have documented that thousands of Korean labourers and Chinese prisoners of war were compelled to work the mines under harsh conditions during the war years. Japan's inclusion of Hashima in its 2015 UNESCO World Heritage nomination for the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution became diplomatically contentious because it omitted this history. Japan eventually agreed to acknowledge the forced labour as part of the UNESCO process, though the framing of that acknowledgement has remained a point of dispute with South Korea.

The overnight abandonment

When Japan shifted its energy economy from coal to petroleum in the 1960s, Hashima's mines became economically unviable. Mitsubishi announced the mine's closure in January 1974. By April 20, 1974, the last resident had left the island. The timing was so rapid that it was described by those who were there as leaving almost overnight. Apartments were left with furniture in place. Schools still had desks and textbooks. The cinema had seats but no more audience. A city that had held over five thousand people at its densest became completely empty in a matter of weeks.

The island was sealed to visitors for 35 years. Access reopened in April 2009, though it remains strictly controlled. Visitors arrive by licensed boat tour from Nagasaki harbour and are permitted to walk only on designated reinforced walkways covering a small fraction of the island. Much of the interior is structurally unstable and off-limits. The concrete towers have been punished by decades of sea salt exposure, and large sections have collapsed. When I look at photographs taken inside the sealed portions, what strikes me most is how quickly a concrete city fell to pieces once the people who maintained it left. The sea air dissolves the rebar inside the concrete, the floors crack, and entire walls slump forward. Hashima is a monument to how briefly industrial permanence actually lasts.

The island appeared in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, which introduced it to a new global audience. Whatever you think of that, the film did more for global awareness of Hashima's actual history than most documentary efforts had managed before it.

3. Kolmanskop, Namibia

The story of Kolmanskop begins with a single diamond found in the sand. In 1908 a railway worker named Zacharias Lewala was clearing sand from the railway tracks near the coastal town of Luderitz in what was then German South West Africa when he found something glinting in the desert surface. He brought it to his supervisor, railway inspector August Stauch, who recognised it as a diamond. What followed was one of the most concentrated diamond rushes in history.

The German colonial administration moved quickly. Within years, Kolmanskop had been built from nothing in the middle of the Namib Desert: a fully functioning German colonial town complete with roads, a power station, a water pipeline, a school, shops, and a residential district of neat Germanic houses. It also had a bowling alley, a ballroom, a seawater swimming pool (in the desert), an ice factory to make chilled drinks for the miners, a theatre, and most remarkably a hospital featuring the first X-ray machine in the entire southern hemisphere. The colonial managers had no intention of roughing it just because the diamonds were in the middle of a desert.

At its peak Kolmanskop was genuinely one of the wealthiest settlements in Africa per capita. The diamonds found near the surface in the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden zone surrounding the town, were of exceptional quality and required no deep mining, just careful collection. A fortunate miner could fill his quota in an afternoon by walking carefully and looking down.

When the sand came back

The diamond deposits closest to Kolmanskop were exhausted soon after World War I. New, richer diamond fields were discovered further south near Oranjemund in the 1920s, pulling the industry and the population southward. The town entered a long decline. The last residents left in the mid-1950s and the Namib Desert did not wait long before moving back in. The sand that the Germans had spent decades fighting off simply returned through every door and window that no longer had anyone to close it.

Today Kolmanskop is one of the most photographed places in Africa precisely because of what the sand has done. In some houses the dunes have poured in to the height of the window frames, burying the original floor tiles completely and leaving only the tops of door frames visible. In others a single dune has entered through the front door and filled the hallway while the adjacent rooms remain relatively clear. The visual contrast between ornate German colonial architecture and encroaching desert is extraordinary. Photographers travel from every continent specifically to capture the morning light through sand-filled rooms.

Kolmanskop is accessible through guided tours booked through Namdeb Diamond Corporation, the successor to the colonial mining operations. Tours depart from Luderitz, about ten kilometers away. The town sits inside the Sperrgebiet National Park, a protected zone that limits independent access. Morning tours are considered best for photography because of the direction of the light.

4. Centralia, Pennsylvania, USA

Centralia is the strangest entry on this list because it is not fully abandoned yet, and also because the thing that drove everyone away is still actively happening beneath the ground right now. There is a coal mine fire burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania that has not stopped since May 1962 and will not stop for an estimated 250 years from today. The town that sits above it has effectively ceased to exist, its streets cracked by sinkholes, its atmosphere made toxic by carbon monoxide seeping through the ground, its population reduced from over a thousand residents in 1981 to fewer than ten today.

Centralia was a coal town. Anthracite coal was discovered in the region during Revolutionary War times and large-scale mining began around 1840. At its peak in 1890 the town had 2,761 residents, seven churches, five hotels and 27 saloons. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent decline of coal put Centralia under pressure for decades. By the early 1960s the population had dropped considerably and the town was dealing with an overfull rubbish pit beside the old strip mine.

In May 1962 Centralia's volunteer fire department was hired by the town government to burn off the landfill as a cleanup measure, a common practice at the time. The fire was not properly extinguished. An opening in the pit allowed the fire to pass into the labyrinth of coal mine tunnels that ran underneath the entire town. Once inside the tunnels, the fire found essentially unlimited fuel and all the oxygen it needed through natural ventilation. Attempts to extinguish it failed completely. The fire spread through the network of tunnels, moving under streets, under houses, under the roads.

The years of denial and displacement

The crisis escalated slowly, which made it easy for officials to ignore for years. In 1979 Centralia's mayor inserted a dipstick into an underground fuel storage tank to check the fuel level and found the contents were at 172 degrees Fahrenheit. A local gas station owner discovered that his underground tanks were heating fuel to dangerous temperatures. By 1981 a twelve-year-old boy named Todd Domboski nearly died when the ground opened beneath his feet in a backyard and he fell into a four-foot sinkhole releasing superheated steam and carbon monoxide. An older cousin grabbed his hand and pulled him out.

The US Congress allocated over 42 million dollars in 1983 to relocate Centralia's residents. Most accepted the buyouts and left. A small group refused and fought the relocation in court for decades. In 1992 Pennsylvania's governor invoked eminent domain on all remaining property in Centralia. The US Postal Service retired Centralia's ZIP code 17927 in 2002. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania officially condemned the remaining occupied structures in 2009, though a small number of residents still live there under an agreement to vacate when they die or leave voluntarily.

What draws people to Centralia today is primarily the physical evidence of the fire: steam rising from cracks in empty roads, dead trees killed by the heat, roads buckled by ground movement. The stretch of old Route 61 that was closed and abandoned due to cracking became known as Graffiti Highway, a destination for urban explorers who covered the broken asphalt with artwork over the years. That section of road was formally closed and partially buried in 2020 to discourage trespassing.

5. Varosha, Cyprus

In the early 1970s Varosha was one of the most desirable addresses in the entire Mediterranean. This beach district in Famagusta, Cyprus had attracted luxury hotel development on a remarkable scale. High-rise hotels lined a broad sandy beach. Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Richard Burton and Raquel Welch were among the celebrities who took holidays there. The town behind the beach was prosperous, modern and growing. Tourists came from across Europe, particularly from Britain and Scandinavia, for whom Cyprus offered reliable sunshine and a familiar colonial infrastructure.

In August 1974 Greece's military junta engineered a coup in Cyprus aimed at uniting the island with Greece. Turkey responded with a military intervention, landing troops on the island's northern coast. Famagusta and the surrounding region fell under Turkish military control within days. The 15,000 Greek Cypriot residents of Varosha fled in terror over a single weekend, many grabbing only what they could carry, leaving behind cars, appliances, clothes, food in refrigerators, boats in the harbour, merchandise in shops. They expected to return within days once the fighting stopped. The fighting stopped. They never returned.

Turkish military forces fenced off Varosha completely and declared it a military zone. For decades entry was illegal even for the original residents. The hotels and apartment buildings rotted behind the wire, their air conditioning units rusting, their pools emptying and filling with debris, their facades crumbling. The cars left in the streets decomposed over decades. Photographs taken through gaps in the fence showed an entire tourist resort frozen at the exact moment of a summer holiday in 1974, the wallpaper still on the walls, the sunbeds still facing the sea.

The partial reopening

In October 2020, Turkish Cypriot authorities reopened a portion of Varosha's beach and a small section of the town to public access for the first time since 1974. The move was internationally condemned by the United Nations and by the Republic of Cyprus as a unilateral action that complicated the ongoing reunification negotiations. The European Union and the United States also objected. From a political standpoint Varosha remains a wound in the Cyprus dispute that has not healed in half a century. From a historical and physical standpoint it is one of the clearest examples in the world of how a single week of political violence can suspend an entire community in time for generations.

The large majority of the built-up area remains fenced and inaccessible to the public. What visitors can now see is a narrow strip of beach and a very limited section of the former town. The high-rise hotel blocks that made Varosha famous are still standing behind the wire, visible but unreachable, slowly collapsing without maintenance, surrounded by vegetation that has grown up through the pavements over fifty years.

6. Oradour-sur-Glane, France

Oradour-sur-Glane is not abandoned in the way that Pripyat or Kolmanskop are abandoned. It is preserved. The difference matters. Charles de Gaulle ordered the ruins of the original village to be maintained exactly as they were left after the massacre of June 10, 1944, as a permanent memorial and a permanent accusation. A new village was built nearby for survivors and returning residents, but the old village was declared untouchable. What stands there today is not decay: it is deliberate preservation of the evidence of a crime.

On the afternoon of June 10, 1944, four days after the D-Day landings in Normandy, a detachment of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich arrived in Oradour-sur-Glane. The specific reason for their targeting of this particular village has been debated by historians for decades. The most widely accepted explanation is that the SS was conducting reprisal actions against communities in the region suspected of supporting the French Resistance, and that Oradour may have been confused with another village called Oradour-sur-Vayres. Whatever the motivation, the result was systematic. The men of the village were herded into barns and machine-gunned. The women and children, 247 women and 205 children, were locked inside the village church and killed with explosives and incendiary grenades. The entire village was then set on fire. 642 people died. Only a handful escaped.

Walking through the ruins today is unlike visiting any other abandoned place on this list. The rusted car bodies in the streets, the collapsed church where the women and children died, the scorched sewing machines in what were once tailors' shops: these are not the artefacts of economic failure or natural disaster. They are the physical remnants of a decision made by specific men to kill all the people in a specific village on a specific afternoon. The memorial centre opened in 1999 carries the names of every victim.

7. Bodie, California, USA

Bodie sits in the high desert of eastern California at an elevation of 2,551 metres, exposed to brutal winters and blistering summers, and it has been slowly disintegrating since the last residents left in the 1940s. It is one of the largest and best-preserved ghost towns in the United States and it is managed today as a state historic park under a policy of arrested decay, meaning the structures are stabilised enough to prevent immediate collapse but are not restored. The buildings age visibly, which is exactly what makes Bodie so compelling.

William S Bodie discovered gold in the region in 1859, though accounts of that discovery are probably embellished by later legend. The town that grew up around the mines was rough even by the standards of the California gold rush. By 1879 Bodie had a population of around 10,000 people, 65 saloons, gambling dens, brothels and a murder rate that alarmed even the frontier press. The phrase badman from Bodie became a common expression in the region. A little girl whose family was moving to Bodie reportedly wrote in her diary: Goodbye God, I am going to Bodie.

The gold played out in the 1880s and the population fell sharply. A cyanide extraction process revived mining briefly around 1900. A fire destroyed much of the town in 1932. By the late 1940s only a handful of people remained. Today around 170 buildings survive, some filled with the furniture, tools and domestic objects of the people who left decades ago. The mill machinery, the mine equipment, the pool tables in the saloons, the calendars on kitchen walls stopped at specific dates: Bodie is an ordinary American town preserved in amber at the exact moment it ceased to function.

8. Craco, Italy

Craco is a medieval hilltop village in the Basilicata region of southern Italy that was abandoned not by a single dramatic event but by a long series of geological misfortunes that made continued habitation impossible. The village was founded in the 8th century on a steep rocky promontory rising 400 metres above the Cavone river valley, and it looks today exactly like what it is: a medieval fortress town slowly losing its battle with the geology beneath it.

Landslides began seriously threatening Craco's lower structures in 1963, forcing the first evacuation of residents to a new settlement in the valley below called Craco Peschiera. Earthquakes followed. Additional landslides in 1972 and 1980 finished the process. By 1980 the old hilltop village was completely empty. The UNESCO programme for endangered heritage sites has since included Craco on its watch lists, and the Italian government has made efforts to stabilise the most structurally critical buildings, but the settlement as a living place is permanently finished.

Craco became well-known to international audiences when the production team for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ chose it as a filming location in 2004. Quantum of Solace also used the ruins in 2008. The visual quality of a perfectly preserved medieval Italian village in a state of dignified but total decay is not something any film set designer could replicate on a budget. Guided tours are available and the views across the Basilicata valley from the ruins are genuinely spectacular, which creates the strange experience of visiting a place of slow disaster in conditions of great natural beauty.

9. Kayakoy, Turkey

Kayakoy, known in Greek as Levissi, was a predominantly Greek Orthodox Christian village in what is now southwestern Turkey, near the modern resort town of Fethiye. It had been continuously inhabited for centuries and held a population of somewhere between 6,500 and 20,000 people at its peak, the varying estimates reflecting the difficulty of accurately counting a dispersed village across a hillside. Its inhabitants were Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians who had lived in Anatolia for generations, in many cases for their entire family histories going back as far as any living person could remember.

The 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, agreed at Lausanne following the catastrophic Greek-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922, ordered the compulsory transfer of approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey and approximately 400,000 Muslims from Greece. The classification was religious rather than linguistic: Greek Muslims who spoke only Greek were sent to Turkey, Turkish Christians who spoke only Turkish were sent to Greece. Kayakoy's population was relocated to Greece, primarily to a settlement near Nea Makri in Attica, which its new residents called Nea Levissi in memory of the home they had left.

The Greek families who arrived to replace Kayakoy's population found the physical style of the houses unfamiliar and the settlement unsuited to their own agricultural practices, so they settled elsewhere and Kayakoy was never repopulated. The houses, the two Greek Orthodox churches, the fountains and the cisterns were left standing and have remained so for over a hundred years. More than 350 stone houses cover the hillside. The churches still have their frescoes, partially. The cobbled lanes are still walkable. Kayakoy is designated as a UNESCO open air museum and is now a major tourist attraction on the Turquoise Coast, combining access to the ruins with proximity to the beaches of Oludeniz.

What strikes me most about Kayakoy is that it represents a category of abandonment different from any other place on this list. It was not destroyed. It was not made toxic. It was simply emptied by bureaucratic decision. The people who lived there were told by two governments that they were the wrong religion for the country they had always known as home, and they left. The houses stand perfectly intact, testimony to a population that was erased by paperwork rather than by fire or flood.

10. Pyramiden, Norway

Pyramiden sits on the Svalbard archipelago at 78 degrees north latitude, roughly halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It was originally a Norwegian mining settlement, founded in 1910, and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927. The Soviets built it into a model Arctic community designed to demonstrate that socialist workers could thrive in conditions where capitalism supposedly could not. By the 1970s and 1980s Pyramiden had a population of around one thousand people, a cultural centre with a swimming pool, a library reportedly containing more books than anywhere else at that latitude, a sports hall, a farm with greenhouses, and a canteen that served hot meals at subsidised prices. The farm grew vegetables under artificial light through the polar winter.

When the Soviet Union collapsed the economics of Arctic coal mining became impossible. The Russian state-owned mining company Trust Arktikugol shut Pyramiden down in 1998, and the evacuation was rapid enough that many personal items were left in place. Residents walked out and did not come back. Because of Svalbard's extreme Arctic climate and the permafrost beneath the buildings, the cold has preserved the settlement in remarkable condition. The gym equipment is still in the gymnasium. Books are still on the library shelves. The grand piano in the cultural centre is still there, tuned annually by a maintenance worker who travels from the nearby settlement of Barentsburg. Polar bears now roam the streets. Visiting without a licensed guide and a firearm is strongly discouraged.

A small number of researchers and maintenance staff returned to Pyramiden around 2013 to operate a basic tourist infrastructure, and boat tours from Longyearbyen, the main settlement on Svalbard, now bring summer visitors to the settlement. The hotel Tulipan reopened to offer overnight stays. Pyramiden is the most remote entry on this list and arguably the most intact, because the cold has acted as a kind of preservative that the temperate climates of other abandoned places cannot offer. Standing in Pyramiden in summer when the sun never sets, looking at Soviet-era murals still bright on interior walls, is an experience that does not translate easily into description.