ABANDONED Towns the World Forgot

We're counting down the 20 most extraordinary abandoned villages and towns of the world. Places that were once full of life and people, but are now desolate and forgotten. Starting with number 20. Komenskop in Namibia. In 1908, a railway worker named Zacharias Lewala was shoveling sand off the tracks in the Namib desert. He spotted something glinting in the low evening light. He showed the stones to his German supervisor who identified them as diamonds. So within months, the area was declared a restricted zone, the Forbidden Territory, and a diamond rush was underway. A town appeared almost overnight, Komenskop, 10 kilometers inland from the ports of Lüderitz. German colonists built it to look like a piece of provincial Germany, transplanted into one of the oldest deserts on the planet. There was one hospital there with the first x-ray machine in the Southern Hemisphere, a concert hall, a bowling alley, and a school, plus a casino, a tram line, and a power station. At its peak in the year 1912, the mines were producing over a million carats a year. That was nearly 12% of the global diamond output, and the men who ran it were becoming extraordinarily wealthy. And then, of course, the diamonds ran out. By the 1920s, the deposits were largely exhausted, and in 1928, richer deposits were discovered 270 kilometers to the south, near the Orange River. People were leaving in droves, and the last resident departed in 1956. And nobody came back, but the sand did. The Namib Desert is the oldest on Earth, and at least 55 million years old, and it doesn't wait for anyone. Sand poured through the open doors of every building that wasn't sealed. It rose up against the walls, it flowed through the windows, and it filled the rooms. So today, visitors walk through Kolmanskop's houses knee-deep in drifts that have swallowed the furniture and tilted the door frames. The ballroom, where German miners once danced to Viennese music, is now a sand dune with a chandelier. 19. Ouredour-sur-Glane, France On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, soldiers from a Waffen-SS division drove into the village of Ouredour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne region of central France. The village had no connection to the French resistance. The SS men gathered every person they could find, men, women, and schoolchildren who had come from the neighboring village for a medical inspection, and herded them into the market square. The men were separated and taken to barns. The women and 205 children were taken to the church. The barns were set alight, the church was set alight, and the women and children tried to escape through the windows and doors were met with machine-gun fire. 642 people died that afternoon, and one woman survived by jumping from a window. The village was then looted and burned to the ground. The SS withdrew at dusk. After the war, French President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of Ouredour be preserved exactly as they were left on the day of the massacre. Not rebuilt, not demolished, preserved. A new Ouredour was constructed nearby for those who needed to live there. The old one became a national memorial. A law was passed to maintain it in its destroyed state indefinitely. Today, you can walk the streets here and see the burned-out shells of homes, the rusted hulks of cars that haven't moved in 80 years, the sewing machines in the collapsed workshops, and the gutted church. A sign at the entrance says simply, souvenir, remember. The rubble and silence are the whole point here. The village isn't a ruin, it's a testimony. It's maintained in perpetuity by the French state, to what happened here in a single afternoon in the summer of 1944. 18. Varosha, Cyprus In the early 1970s, Varosha was the jewel of the eastern Mediterranean, a suburb of Famagusta on the eastern coast of Cyprus. It had become one of the most fashionable beach resorts in Europe. White-towered hotels, designer boutiques, restaurants spilling onto the sun-bleached promenades and a clientele that included Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Brigitte Bardot. The population swelled to nearly 39,000. At its peak, Varosha hosted over half of all tourists visiting Cyprus. The hotels were booked months in advance. A new hotel was mid-construction, three concrete blocks hanging from the top of a crane. And then, on July 20, 1974, at the height of the tourist season, the Turkish military invaded Cyprus. Within hours, Varosha's 39,000 residents and hundreds of hotel guests had fled. They left meals on tables, clothes in their wardrobes, and shops and mannequins still dressed in the season's fashions. They believed they would be back in days. The Turkish military fenced off the entire district and declared it a restricted military zone. Nobody was allowed back, not the residents, not the shop owners, not the hotel guests who had abandoned their luggage. A U.N. Security Council resolution in 1984 called for the area to be handed to the U.N. administration and returned only to its original inhabitants. The resolution was ignored, and Varosha has been sealed, largely untouched, for more than 50 years. The hotels have collapsed slowly, the trees have grown through the lobbies, and the cars that were left in the Toyota dealership still have their 1974 price tags. The mannequins are still in the windows, wearing fashions from 50 years ago, and the crane still stands over the unfinished hotel and those three concrete blocks still hanging up there. 17. Crecco, Italy Sitting on a 400-meter cliff above the Cavone River in southern Italy, Crecco was settled in the 8th century, and it grew into a medieval city with a Norman tower and four large plazas. Founded a university in 1276, it also survived the Black Death, survived the Napoleonic occupation, and survived brigand raids. It was eventually undone by a sewer. In 1963, new infrastructure works, pipes, water systems, drainage, it destabilized the clay-rich soil the town had always sat on. The first major landslide followed, the remaining 1,800 people were evacuated to a new settlement in the valley below, Crecco Pesciera, on the understanding that they might eventually return. A flood in 1972 made the upper town structurally worse, and then an earthquake in 1980 finished it, and nobody went back. From below, the view of the Crecco is extraordinary, a medieval skyline still fully intact, towers and churches rising above the eroded landscape, those strange bare clay mounds formed by centuries of erosion around the base of the cliff. From the air, Crecco looks exactly as it must have looked in 1963. The streets are still there, the plazas are still there, and the Norman tower still stands. A guided tour wearing a hard hat gets you inside, past the abandoned bakery and the open church. The buildings here are structurally failing, but photographically, it's extraordinary. It's a medieval Italian village in the process of slowly becoming a ruin, on a timeline of centuries rather than years. Hollywood, though, has found it useful. The Passion of the Christ, Quantum of Solace, and several Italian productions have filmed here, and I guess the cliff isn't finished with it yet. 16. Villa Epequen, Argentina Villa Epequen was founded in 1921 on the shore of a salt lake in the Buenos Aires province, about 500 kilometers southwest of the capital. The lake's water is highly saline, 10 times saltier than the ocean, and it was credited with healing properties for skin conditions and rheumatism. The town became one of Argentina's most fashionable resort destinations. At its peak in the 1970s, it had 5,000 permanent residents, 300 businesses, and up to 25,000 summer visitors, and a direct train service from Buenos Aires, called the Sarimento Railway. Wealthy holiday makers came to float in the therapeutic waters and stay in the grand hotels. The town's art deco architecture made it genuinely beautiful. On November 10th, 1985, after years of heavier than average rainfall had caused the lake to swell, the dam protecting the town gave way. The water rose at roughly a centimeter per hour, and within two weeks, it was up to three meters deep. By 1993, Villa Epequen was submerged under 10 meters of water. The salt preserved the structures beneath rather than destroying them, and the entire town sat on the bottom of the lake for nearly 25 years. And then the water began to recede. Drought conditions from 2009 onward caused the lake to drop, and the ruins slowly re-emerged, bleached white by the salt, stripped back, and petrified. The trees are still standing, leafless and skeletal. Their branches are coated in salt. The cars are rusted hulks, half buried in sediment. The slaughterhouse, designed in the 1930s by the noted art deco architect Francisco Salamone, still largely stands intact at the town's entrance. One man, Pablo Novak, returned to live among the ruins in 2009, and he stayed until his death in 2024. 15. Centralia, Pennsylvania On May 27, 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired volunteer firefighters to burn off the town's landfill in preparation for Memorial Day. The landfill sit in an abandoned strip mine pit, and the fire wasn't properly extinguished. Through an unsealed opening in the pit, it reached a coal seam. Within weeks, the fire had entered the labyrinth of abandoned mine tunnels running beneath the town, tunnels that supplied it with unlimited oxygen and unlimited fuel. Every attempt to extinguish it failed, and the fire burned deeper and spread further, and it grew hotter. Underground temperatures in some sections exceeded 900 degrees Fahrenheit. For 20 years, most of Centralia's 1,500 residents didn't fully grasp what was happening. Smoke was rising from unusual places, some vegetables grew strangely fast heated from below, a gas station owner inserted a thermometer into his underground fuel tank and found that the gasoline registered 172 degrees Fahrenheit. But the situation became undeniable in February of 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski fell through the ground that gave way beneath him and his grandmother's backyard and fell into a sinkhole 150 deep. He grabbed a tree root and held on until his cousin pulled him out. The steam rising up from the hole contained lethal levels of carbon monoxide. While Congress allocated 42 million to relocate residents voluntarily, in 1992, Pennsylvania evoked eminent domain over the entire borough and condemned all of its properties. The buildings were demolished and the zip code was revoked. The population, once over a thousand, fell to five, and Centralia today is a field of empty streets running between empty lots, with smoke still rising from cracks in the tarmac. Geologists have estimated that the fire could continue burning for another 250 years. 14. Kayakoy, Turkey On the Aegean coast of Turkey, on a hillside above a valley of olive groves, there's approximately 500 stone houses that are standing empty. They've been empty since 1923. The town is called Levisi, and its inhabitants were Greek Orthodox Christians who had lived on the hillside for generations growing olives, working as craftsmen, and living alongside the Muslim Turkish farmers in the valley below. The two communities had coexisted peacefully for centuries. A 17th century fountain still stands in the middle of the town. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in January of 1923 to end the Greco-Turkish War, included a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Greek Orthodox Christians living in Turkey would be relocated to Greece. Muslims living in Greece would be relocated to Turkey. It affected approximately 1.5 million people in total. The residents of Levisi were Greeks who had never lived in Greece, and they were sent there anyway. Muslim settlers from Greece were moved in to take their place, and the new arrivals found the stone houses on the hillsides unsuitable. The buildings were not designed for the farming life they knew, and they chose to live in the valley instead. The hillside houses were just left empty. A 1957 earthquake damaged many of them, the roofs fell in, the frescoes in the two Greek Orthodox churches faded and crumbled, and today Kayakoy is an open-air museum protected by the Turkish government. It's 500 stone shells accessible to visitors. The charnel house beside the upper church contains the bones of those whose families could not take them to Greece. 13. Fordlandia, Brazil Henry Ford, the man who built the most successful automobile company in history, believed he could do the same thing in a rainforest. In 1927, Ford negotiated a deal with the Brazilian government. He would receive 10,000 square kilometers of Amazon jungle in exchange for a 9% share of profits. He planned to grow rubber trees for his tires, and alongside the plantation he would build a small American city, a piece of Dearborn, Michigan, in the middle of a river basin. Fordlandia would have American-style houses, a hospital, a school, a swimming pool, a golf course, a cinema, and a cafeteria serving Ford's preferred diet of whole wheat bread, oatmeal, and brown rice. The Brazilian workers would live like good Midwesterners, and in 1928 ships arrived carrying an entire prefabricated town in pieces. It all failed immediately and comprehensively. The Brazilian workforce rioted over the food. The terrain was wrong for the plantation layout. Ford's managers had planted the rubber trees close together in dense rows, unaware that in nature rubber trees grow apart precisely to avoid spreading disease, and the dense plantation became an incubator for every pest and Caterpillars ate the leaves. Ants stripped the bark. Leaf blight killed entire sections. Ford refused to visit or accept that his plan was wrong. He just simply kept spending money, and by the time the plant was sold back to the Brazilian government in 1945 for a quarter million dollars, Ford had invested approximately $20 million. Not a single drop of Fordlandia latex had ever made it into a Ford car. The jungle has spent the decades since taking it all back. 12. Kennecott, Alaska In the summer of 1900, two prospectors exploring the edge of the Kennecott Glacier in the Rango Mountains of Alaska came across an extraordinary green patch on the mountain above them. They thought it was a meadow. It was malachite, one of the richest deposits of copper ever found. J.P. Morgan and a consortium of investors then moved in, formed the Kennecott Copper Corporation, and over four years built a 196-mile railroad through a mountainous canyon to connect the mines to a port at Cordoba. The railroad alone was considered one of the most important engineering achievements of the era. By 1916, the peak production year, the mines were generating $32 million worth of copper annually. The town grew to house 600 workers, with a hospital, a school, and a skating rink. A 14-story red mill building was then constructed to process the ore using gravity alone, and in 1925, a company geologist reported that the high-grade ore bodies were nearly depleted. The final mine closed in September of 1938, and the last train left Kennecott on November 10, 1938. The workers packed what they could carry, left most of their belongings behind, and they didn't return. And because of the site's remoteness, accessible only by a 60-mile gravel road, Kennecott was essentially untouched for decades. Calendars still hang on the walls at the year the mine was closed, and dishes still sit on the shelves in the cookhouse. The equipment the miners left is still standing in the mill building, exactly where they set it down. The 14-story red mill is now a National Historic Landmark, and polar bears will occasionally roam on the ground floor. 11. CONSONO, ITALY A count named Mario Bagno bought the medieval hilltop village of Consono in the Italian Alps near Lecco in 1962 for about £10,000. There were 60 residents, and he told them he planned to build a few hotels to attract tourists. Then the bulldozers arrived. Bagno demolished almost the entire village, forcing the last holdout families out of their houses as the machines moved in, and replaced it with something he called the Città dei Barocci, the City of Toys. Where the medieval stone houses had stood, he built a grand hotel, casino, a dance hall, restaurants, and a pagoda topped with a cannon. Arabic domes, Chinese ornaments, a fake Western saloon, the complete architectural confetti of someone who had decided to build Las Vegas in the Italian Alps one hour from Milan for no immediate obvious reason. And remarkably, it did kind of work for a few years. In the late 1960s and 70s, Consono attracted thousands of people. Italian celebrities performed there, newly married couples honeymooned there, the minaret became a local landmark visible from the valley. Then, in October 1976, a landslide destroyed the only road connecting Consono. Visitors stopped coming overnight, Bagno's attempts to rebuild faltered, the businesses closed, the staff left, the grand hotel sat empty, and Bagno died in 1995. Today, Consono is a celebrated urban exploration site, Arabic domes and Chinese pagodas crumbling in an Italian forest covered in graffiti, and the sounds of birds where the dance halls once played music. 10. Bodie, California In 1859, a prospector named W.S. Bodie found gold in the hills east of the Sierra Nevada in Mono County, California. He died in a blizzard that same winter before he could profit from his discovery, and in 1876, a major gold deposit was confirmed at the site that bore a misspelled version of his name. Within three years, Bodie had a population of 10,000. 2,000 buildings, 65 saloons, a red light district, a Chinatown, newspaper, four fire companies, and a reputation as one of the most violent towns in the American West. A child's diary from 1880, upon being told the family was moving to Bodie, recorded, "'Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie.'" In its peak decade, the mines produced an estimated $35 million worth of gold, and the violence there was pretty real. Shootings were reported in the local paper with the same regularity as the weather. The decline was gradual, though. The gold thinned, the population shrank, and the saloons closed one by one. A fire in 1932 destroyed much of central business district, and by 1942, the last mine was suspended under wartime production controls. Only a handful of people remained. The post office then closed, and the town was done. California designated Bodie a State Historic Park in 1962. The policy was deliberately unusual. The state calls it arrested decay. The buildings are not restored, and they're not demolished, they're just simply stabilized enough to present them from falling down. Curtains still hang in the windows, and medicine sits on the shelves of the pharmacy. A pool table waits in the saloon, the cemetery holds the bones of the miners who never left. More than a hundred buildings remain, and visiting Bodie is the closest thing available to walking into a 1942 neighborhood through an unlocked door. 9. Tyneham in Dorset, England There's a note pinned to the door of the church in Tyneham that's been reproduced and discussed in books, films, and exhibitions for 80 years. The original was placed there on December 19th, 1943, when the last of the village's 225 residents walked out of their homes on the orders of the British War Office. The note read, in part, quote, Please treat the church and houses with care. We have given up our homes where many of us have lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day, and thank you for treating the village kindly. End quote. Well, they never returned, and no one has lived in Tyneham since that December morning. Tyneham sits in a valley roughly between Weymouth and Swanage, and it's been there under various names since at least the Domesday Book of 1086. By 1943, though, it was a small and somewhat isolated farming community of 225 people. The War Office gave them 47 days' notice when the land was needed for training Allied troops preparing for D-Day. The surrounding area of Salisbury Plain and the Dorset Ranges were already heavily militarized, and the Army needed more space for live firing and combined arm exercises. The villagers were told it was temporary, they were promised they would be allowed to return once the war was over, and most left without protest. After the war ended in 1945, the military assessed the land and decided that it wanted to keep it, an inquiry in the 1960s found in favor of retaining Tyneham for military use. A campaign called Forever Imber intended to highlight the parallel fate of another requisitioned village, brought to attention by Tyneham's case in Parliament. It changed nothing, though. In the early 1970s, the Defence Lands Committee heard the case again, including testimony from a former soldier who had helped evacuate the village. The committee again recommended the village stay under military control. The villagers who had been children in 1943 were middle-aged by then, and some of the elderly ones have died without going home. Today, though, Tyneham is open to visitors on certain weekdays and public holidays, when the military training area surrounding it is not in active use. There's maybe 50 days a year when the public can walk its streets, and the farmhouses and cottages are just roofless shells now. The Church of St. Mary's has been maintained, and it still holds an annual service on the Saturday nearest to September 1st. Warburrow Bay, a mile's walk from the village, is one of the most beautiful and unspoiled bays on the Dorset coast. The residents who wanted to return, though, who campaigned to return, and who died without returning, are buried in the churchyard at St. Mary's. You can visit their grave and the church where the note was still pinned stands. 8. Belchite, Aragon, Spain In August 1937, in the second year of the Spanish Civil War, Republican forces launched an offensive in the Aragon region, intended to relieve pressure on the other fronts and capture the city of Zaragoza, 40 kilometers to the northwest. Their route took them through a small market town called Belchite, which at that time had a population of about 3,000 people and no particular military significance. The Nationalist forces holding the town refused to surrender, and for 15 days, Republican troops, including American volunteers from the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade and foreign correspondents, including Ernest Hemingway, attacked a town that the defenders were prepared to fight for street by street and house by house. The Republican forces finally took Belchite on September 7th, 1937. By that point, the town was almost entirely destroyed. At least 5,000 people had been killed, including civilians trapped in fighting. The reporter who came with Hemingway wrote that the scene was less a town than a nasty smell. When Francisco Franco's forces took Belchite in 1938, he made a decision that was entirely in keeping with the nature of his regime. Rather than demolish the ruins or rebuild the town, he ordered them preserved exactly as they were, as a monument to the brutality of his enemies. The new town, Belchite Nuevo, was partly constructed by Republican prisoners of war, and the old town, Belchito Viejo, was fenced off and declared a memorial. For the next four decades of Franco's dictatorship, it served its intended political purpose, a set of carefully maintained ruins designed to demonstrate the destructive capacity of the Republican movement. After Franco's death in 1975 and the transition to democracy, Belchite's meaning slowly changed. The town stopped being a monument to nationalist heroism and started being understood as what it actually was, a monument to what war does to people unlucky enough to be in its way. The cathedral, with its pockmarked walls and bullet holes and mortar damage, and the church of San Martin de Tur, which from certain angles looks more like a medieval ruin than a 20th century one, attract around 40,000 people a year. Belchite is only accessible by a guided tour. You book at the tourist office in the new town and walk through the old one with a guide who explains, and in even hand as way as possible, what happened here in the summer of 1937. All the bullet holes are real here, the collapsed walls are real and the streets whose sides fought room to room for two weeks is still there, unrestored, exactly as the battle left it. 7. Agdam, Azerbaijan Before 1993, Agdam was a city of roughly 30,000 people in western Azerbaijan, situated on the edge of the Karbakh plain, near the border of Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. It had factories making wine, brandy, machine tools, and silk textiles. It had two railway stations, an airport, and a drama theater. It was a functioning mid-sized Soviet-era city, with all the unremarkable infrastructure that entails, schools, hospitals, a market, parks, apartment blocks, family homes, and in July of 1993, as the first war reached its most intense phase, the Armenian forces captured Agdam after heavy bombardment. The theater was destroyed, the hospital was destroyed, and what the fighting hadn't ruined, deliberate demolition did. By 1994, when a ceasefire was reached, Agdam was virtually gone. The one building left partially intact was the main mosque, which retained its minarets but lost its roof. The city itself, or where the city had been, became a buffer zone, officially uninhabited. For 27 years, Agdam existed in a strange suspended state, nominally part of Azerbaijan, controlled by the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, inaccessible to civilians from either side, visited only by the occasional journalist. Those who made it in described a landscape of foundations and rubble stretching across a large plateau. Local people began calling it the Hiroshima of the Caucasus. The comparison is imperfect, of course, Hiroshima was rebuilt, but the scale of the deliberate destruction is genuinely comparable. In November of 2020, the second war saw Azerbaijan retake Agdam and the surrounding territory. President Ilham Aliyev revisited the ruins and announced plans to rebuild. Reconstruction is underway and an industrial park has been established. The new city is being planned with boulevards and mosques and a university. What's being built on the foundations of Agdam will be something new and Azerbaijani. The old Agdam, the Soviet city, existed before 1993. The place where those families lived is long gone. What remains of it is that you can read about it in archives and in the memories of the people who fled east and never came back. Most abandoned towns are left by economics, by nature, by circumstance. Agdam was dismantled on purpose, systematically stripped and then demolished to prevent the population from returning. The football club that bore its name continued to play in exile in Baku for three decades, becoming the symbol of the displaced community and eventually winning Azerbaijan's national championship. The club's name kept Agdam alive in a way that the ruins didn't. When Azerbaijan retook the city in 2020 and the players posed for photographs in front of the destroyed stadium, they were posing in front of what had been taken from a community, not an abstract political entity but the specific place where specific people had grown up and played football on Sunday mornings, and they bought wine from the local factory and gone to the theater and sent their children to school. The rebuilding of Agdam will produce a city, but it will not produce the one that was there before. 6. Ani, Turkey On the border between Turkey and Armenia, on a plateau above a river gorge, there's ruins of a city that was one of the largest and most sophisticated urban centers in the medieval world. Its name is Ani. In the year 1000 AD, its population is estimated to have been about 100,000, which would have made it larger than contemporaneous London, Paris, or Rome. It was the capital of the Batagrid Armenian Kingdom, the center of Silk Road trade connecting Byzantium to Persia and a city of extraordinary architectural achievement. The Cathedral of Ani, completed in the year 1001 by the architect Tirdat, who also repaired the Dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, contains ribbed vaulting and pointed arches that predate similar features in European Gothic cathedrals. The decline of Ani began with the Seljuk invasion of 1064, when the city was sacked and much of its population was killed or enslaved. It changed hands repeatedly over the following centuries. Byzantine, Kurdish, Georgian, Mongol rule, and each transfer involved varying degrees of destruction. A devastating earthquake in 1319 collapsed the cathedral's dome and damaged much of the city. Then shifting trade routes bypassed it, and by the 18th century, Ani was abandoned entirely. 19th century explorers and archaeologists rediscovered it and found a ghost city of extraordinarily preserved ruins, already romantically overgrown, standing on a plateau that now sat on the border of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Then the First World War and the aftermath sealed the region. The violence of that period, including the mass killings of the Armenian population of Eastern Anatolia, transformed the political and cultural meaning of Ani entirely. For Armenians, the ruins of their former capital sat on the other side of a border that's been closed since 1993, visible from viewing points on the Armenian side but unreachable without traveling through a third country. Turkey declared Ani a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016 and opened it to visitors. You can walk across the plateau now, past the cathedral and the churches and the mosque and the palace, through the massive city walls. On the far side of the river is Armenia, and from the Armenian side, Ani is visible in the distance, accessible only to those who have made the long journey through Georgia. Some of the churches were used as stables during the period of heaviest military restriction. Some inscriptions were defaced, some carved decorations were removed or damaged, and UNESCO's designation has improved the protection considerably here. The cathedral is scaffolded. The Church of St. Gregory, the best preserved building on the sites, does contain fragments of extraordinary frescoes, but standing inside of it and looking up is one of the stranger experiences available to a traveler in this part of the world. It's a 13th-century Armenian church with Byzantine-influenced painting on a Turkish plateau 50 meters from the Armenian border. It's utterly empty and almost completely unknown to Western visitors. 5. Wittenoom, Western Australia During the 1950s, Wittenoom was the largest town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a company town of around 800 people built to house the workers of Australia's only blue asbestos mine. Blue asbestos is the most dangerous form of asbestos. Its microscopic fibers, when inhaled, lodge permanently in lung tissue and cause mesothelioma, a cancer that typically kills within 12 months of diagnosis and can emerge decades after exposure. The mine had been operating since 1943. The tailings, that's the fine dust waste from the milling process, was used for everything in Wittenoom – road surfacing, school playgrounds, footpaths, the airport runway backyards, and children's sand pits. The air in the gorge where the mine operated was dense with fibers. Workers walked through clouds of asbestos dust without protective equipment because the company had not informed them of the risk, and technically because the Australian regulations at the time didn't require protection. The mine closed in 1966, officially because it was unprofitable. A public health catastrophe had already begun. Over the following decades, an estimated 2,000 workers, residents, and people who had merely passed through Wittenoom died of asbestos-related diseases. That number is likely considered an undercount, partly because many of the workers had been migrant laborers from Europe who returned home and died there without being added to the Australian statistics. The Western Australian government began a systematic effort to make Wittenoom uninhabitable and inaccessible. Road signs with the town's name were painted over. The town was removed from official maps in 2007. The electricity was cut off and government services were withdrawn. The Wittenoom Closure Bill, passed in 2022, allowed for the compulsory acquisition and demolition of the final privately-owned properties. In 2023, the remaining structures were demolished and the site was fenced off. The last resident, an 80-year-old woman named Lorraine Thomas, departed as the bulldozers arrived. This land cannot be decontaminated. Three million tons of asbestos tailings remain in and around the gorge, and the site will remain sealed indefinitely. Wittenoom is not a ghost town in the conventional sense. It's a crime scene that's too dangerous to visit. The latency period for mesothelioma is between 20 and 60 years, which means that people who were children in Wittenoom in the 1950s were still dying of its consequences in the 2000s and 2010s. Former residents have described symptoms appearing 40 years after their last contact with the town. Australia does have one of the highest rates of mesothelioma in the world, which is a direct consequence of the scale at which asbestos was used during the construction boom of the post-war period. Wittenoom is the most visible symbol of that legacy, but the fibers it released into the Australian environment remain in older buildings across the country. The town is now gone. The asbestos is not. 4. Dhanushkodi, India At the very southeastern tip of the Pumbam Island in Tamil Nadu, where India comes closest to Sri Lanka, just about 31 kilometers of open water separate the two countries, there once was a thriving port town called Dhanushkodi. The name translates as end of the bow from the Hindu legend that Lord Rama pointed the tip of his bow here to indicate where his army should build a bridge to reach Lanka. The town had been a transit point between India and Ceylon for generations, a railway station, customs office, a hospital, and a school, and at its peak it had around 5,000 residents, and it was a busy crossing point for both commercial traffic and Hindu pilgrims. On the night of December 22-23, 1964, one of the most severe cyclones to ever make landfall in India arrived here. Winds were recorded at over 270 kph, and the storm surge drove down waves seven and a half meters high across a landmass that barely rose above sea level. At 11.55 pm, a daily train carrying 110 passengers and five railway staff was entering Dhanushkodi station when it was struck by the tidal wave itself. The entire train was swept into the sea and all 115 people on board were killed. In the town itself, the walls of the stone buildings, the railway station, the church at the school partially absorbed the surge, but wooden and brick structures were leveled. At least 800 people died in Dhanushkodi alone. The total death toll from the cyclone across the region exceeded 1,800. The following year, the government of Madras declared Dhanushkodi officially unfit for human habitation, and the town was not rebuilt, the railway line was not repaired. The stone walls of the railway station do stand in the sea and the church walls rise up from the sand. Parts of the old train have resurfaced from the seabed, around 400 fishermen and their families have drifted back to the area, and they live without electricity, running water, or even sanitation, catching fish in the waters that destroyed the town six decades ago. What makes Dhanushkodi unusual among abandoned towns is the speed of it. Most towns die slowly, over years, decades, sometimes centuries. Dhanushkodi died in a single night. The people who went to sleep in their houses on December 22nd, 1964 woke up, if they woke up at all, to find everything gone. The station master on duty that night survived by climbing onto the roof of a station building as the wave moved through. He spent the rest of his working life giving testimony about what he had seen. He died in 2013, described by Indian Railways as the last living official witness to the disaster. With him went the last firsthand account of what Dhanushkodi was before the storm. What remains in the stone, the church wall, the station foundation, the exposed railway sleepers, and the photographs taken before 1964 that show a functioning town, the busy crossing children outside of the school, it's the contrast between these photographs and what stands there now. It's the whole story of Dhanushkodi, and it takes about 30 seconds to understand it. Number 3. Pyramiden, Svalbard, Norway. Pyramiden sits at 78 degrees north latitude, halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. To reach it, you gotta take a boat from Longyearbyen, the nearest town, itself one of the northernmost permanently inhabited places. As you step off the boat, two men in long dark coats are waiting on the jetty, and they're carrying rifles. This isn't a movie, this is Svalbard, and the rifles are for polar bears. Sweden founded Pyramiden in 1910, identified coal deposits in the mountains above, and began a small-scale mining operation. In 1927, the Soviet Union bought it. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920, which granted Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, gave all signatory nations the right to conduct commercial activities, which for the Soviets meant coal mining. Pyramiden was never primarily about the coal, which was always of mediocre quality and was never profitable. It was about the flag. It was about having a piece of Soviet territory, and later Russian territory, sitting inside what effectively was a NATO-adjacent archipelago, demonstrating the reach and permanence of the Soviet project. So they built it up properly. By the 1980s, Pyramiden had a population of over a thousand Russian and Ukrainian miners and their families, living in solid Soviet-style apartment blocks with rounded edges. At the center of the main square stood a bust of Lenin on a pedestal, gazing north across the settlement towards the glacier, and it's still there. He's the only permanent resident. The decline came with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. The state mining company there could no longer afford to subsidize both of its Svalbard operations, and then in August of 1996, a charter flight from Moscow carrying 141 miners, staff, and family members, approximately 10% of the population there, crashed on approach to Svalbard airport. All 141 were killed. That community never really fully recovered from the loss. In March of 1998, the last coal was extracted from the mine. The decision to close was announced. The cafeteria here was abandoned mid-meal. Glasses on windowsills, plants still in the pots, Pepsi cans still in the walk-in refrigerator. The swimming pool was left full, the piano in the cultural palace was left open, even the library with its books on the shelves. By October 1998, the last permanent resident had departed. Pyramiden had become a ghost town overnight, at 78 degrees north in the dark. In 2007, the company there began cautiously opening Pyramiden to tourism. A small team of caretakers and guides arrived seasonally. The hotel was renovated and reopened in 2013, and today you can stay overnight there, drink Soviet-era vodka at the bar, visit the gymnasium where miners played basketball, and stand in front of the Lenin statue while reindeer graze on the imported Siberian grass. The cinema has been restored and a functioning projector maintained. An archive of over a thousand Soviet films is stored here in the projection room, available to play on request for whoever happens to be staying in the hotel that night. What Pyramiden offers here is something rare, a complete Soviet settlement intact, preserved by cold and remoteness. The books are still on the library shelves and the scores are still on the piano. The weight room still has barbells in their racks and if you visit in the summer, the sun doesn't set. It just circles the sky at a low angle and never quite disappears. The midnight sun, the empty streets, the polar bears in the distance, the Lenin watching from his pedestal, still waiting for someone to tell him the news. 2. Pompeii, Italy In 79 AD, in August, the people of Pompeii were having a normal day. We know this because the archaeology here is so complete that historians have been able to reconstruct it almost hour by hour. They were shopping in the market, arguing in the forum, visiting the baths, buying bread from the bakeries where the loaves were still in the ovens when the city was buried. There was an election campaign underway. Political slogans painted on building facades had been partially freshened with new paint just days before the eruption. A dog was chained outside a house on the street of abundance. Garum, the ubiquitous fermented fish sauce that Roman cooking depended on, was being produced in the workshop vats. Children were playing. Somebody had just had lunch. Then Vesuvius erupted. The sequence of events took roughly 18 hours. The initial explosion sent a column of volcanic material 27 kilometers into the sky. Pumice and ash began falling on the city at a rate that made it difficult to stand upright. Some residents fled immediately. Others sheltered, expecting the worst to pass. By the following morning, a pyroclastic surge, a superheated wave of gas and volcanic material moving at a devastating speed, swept across Pompeii and killed everyone that remained. The bodies were then buried under four to six meters of compacted ash and pumice. Over time, the organic material of the bodies decomposed, leaving hollow spaces in the hardened volcanic deposit. When archaeologists in the 19th century began injecting plaster into those voids, they produced casts of the dead at the moment of their death. People curled on the ground, covering their faces, clinging to walls, some still visibly in the postures of their last conscious moments. A dog contorted on its back, its collar still around its neck. The city under the ash was essentially intact. The roofs had collapsed under the weight of the ash, but the walls, floors, and frescoes, mosaics, the furniture, the food, the tools, the possessions, all of it was preserved in a way that is unique in the ancient world. Pompeii has been continuously excavated since 1748, making it the longest-running archaeological project in history. Approximately two-thirds of the site have been excavated. The remaining third has been deliberately left intact for future researchers who will have tools and techniques not yet invented. A major restoration project, the Great Pompeii Project, began in 2012 and has since established and restored large sections of the city. New discoveries continue in 2021. Excavations in an unexcavated block reveal the fully intact remains of a thermopolium, complete with decorated counters, serving vessels, and traces of the food that had been on sale on the last day, which was snails, salted fish, and fava beans, plus wine, which was a normal lunch counter frozen in the middle of a normal day 2,000 years ago. What Pompeii offers that no other site on earth can match isn't grandeur. Rome has more impressive buildings. Athens has more significant ones. This has intimacy. The scale is human. The streets are the width of actual streets. The rooms are the size of actual rooms. And the graffiti on the walls was written by actual people who had opinions about local politicians. A gladiator named Crescens was described by an admirer as Lord of the Girls. A man named Successus was insulted by a verse by a rival named Severus about a woman named Iris. The insult and the counter-insult are still there on the wall, with the names still legible. And none of these people expected it to be read, none of them expected it to be preserved. They died in a disaster they didn't understand, on what had seemed to them like a perfectly ordinary day in August. And the disaster that killed them was the thing that kept their words alive for 2,000 years. 1. Ember, Wiltshire, England Ember doesn't look like a dramatic place. It sits in a shallow valley in the middle of a Salisbury plain. Flat, grassy, unremarkable from the air. The kind of English countryside that tends to produce adjectives like gentle and unassuming. The village itself is small. A church, some farm buildings, a pub called the Bell Inn, a few cottages, a manor house, a schoolhouse. The architecture is plain. What makes Ember one of the most striking places in England is not what it looks like, but what happened there, and what has not happened there since. Ember has been in this valley for at least a thousand years. It appears in the Domesday Book, listed as Emreiri. Saxon records mention it before that, and for all those centuries it was an agricultural community. The population peaked at about 440 in the census of 1851, and by 1943 it had fallen to 152 people, smaller than it once was, but functioning, rooted with the deep continuity of a community that has existed in the same valley for a thousand years. On November 1st, 1943, the residents of Ember were called to a meeting in the village schoolroom. A representative of the War Office explained that the village and the surrounding land were needed for military training. American troops preparing for the Allied invasion of Europe required more space on Salisbury Plain for combined arms exercises, and Ember's position in the plain made it useful. They were given 47 days notice. They were promised, and the promise was made at the village meeting, repeated at subsequent meetings, confirmed by a senior general, that once the war was over they would be allowed to return. It was temporary. It was an emergency. Their sacrifice was acknowledged, and return was assured. Most of the 152 residents accepted this. They left without any significant protest. They understood the emergency. Some left food in their kitchen cupboards, planning to use it when they came back. One farm owner had to be forcibly removed. The local blacksmith was found weeping over his anvil. An elderly man named Alfred Nash was said to have died within a month of the eviction, of what was described as a broken heart. By the end of December 1943, Ember was empty. American troops moved in and began using the village buildings as they stood. After the war ended, the villagers began petitioning for their return. An initial inquiry found against them. A campaign called Forever Ember brought their case to Parliament in the 1960s. A Defense Lands Committee hearing in the early 1970s received testimony from a former soldier who had helped evacuate the village and who confirmed the original promise of return. He had heard it made directly by a senior officer to the assembled residents. The committee had the original 1943 eviction letter, which referred to the requisition as temporary. The committee again recommended that the village remain under military control. The people who had been children in Ember in 1943 were in their 40s and 50s by the time their final petition was denied. Some of the oldest residents who had wanted to go back had already died. Today, Ember is an active military area. The buildings that survive, the bell-in, the manor house, the farm cottages, are used as part of a purpose-built urban warfare training complex. The Church of St. Giles, which remained in the ownership of the Diocese of Salisbury rather than the Ministry of Defense, is maintained and open on certain days of the year. Fewer than 50 people, typically, with the training schedule allows, an annual service is held on the Saturday nearest to September 1st, attended by the descendants of the former residents. The graveyard at St. Giles contains the grave of the people who lived in Ember before 1943. Some of the residents who were evacuated asked to be buried there, and they were. Their descendants still make the journey for the annual service, driving through military checkpoint gates onto the plain, parking in a field, and walking into a village that most people have never heard of and that most people cannot visit. The church is locked on the 315 or so days within the year where training area is active, and the village that was promised back is used every week for exercises that simulate the urban warfare its residents were helping to prevent when they left. The evacuation was temporary. That was 80 years ago.