Part 210 - 22 Ghost City Around The World... (",)

Get Your Pics Here

Let travel around the world and visit some interesting city that we called "Ghost City"...
Can you guest where the place is???

1. The origins and much of the history of this slow-built settlement in Tuscany remain unknown, constructed in pieces over many centuries. In the 1100s it was owned by the Benedictine abbey of San Pietro dei Monti. Today the beautiful small town-on-the-bluffs features a castle at the top and partially walled city sprawled on the olive-treed hillside around – but all are completely abandoned. Due to seismic instability the residents were moved out decades ago, leaving behind a perfectly preserved but piecemeal museum of modern and medieval history. Still, visit it soon: the next earthquake in the area may be the last this old town ever sees.






2. During the heat of conflict in World War II, a few informants told German troops that one of their own officers was being held in a nearby French town. What ensued was a terrible massacre that only spared a handful of men and women who managed to escape. Children and women were rounded up into a church and burned alive, men were shot in the legs to die slowly in a barn. Today, the remains of the old city still stand as a memorial to the events of that terrible day and the new commune of Oradour has been relocated to a nearby area.





3. Hashima is one of the most remarkable of a series of hundreds of deserted Japanese islands. Once a thriving coal-mining city its population density grew to be the highest on the planet, with workers crammed vertically in ever-growing buildings and walked daily through ever-narrowing streets. Following a drop in coal production the entirely island amazingly shut down though most of its structures still stand. Currently the island is being renovated to create safe tourist paths through the rubble and tilting buildings but for now daring (and illegal) exploration is possible only by hiring a willing private boat driver to take a look.



4. A series of structures seemingly displaced in space in time, the remains of a diamond-mining settlement in Africa sits abandoned and partly covered by long-gathered dunes of sand. Tourists have a difficult trek to get to Kolmanskop to see what remains of its strangely Germanic architecture – and then wade through the drifts to get a glimpse of the inside of its structures. Like any good German town the area had a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, theater and casino. When the diamond market crashed it was simply left to be covered over with the sands of time.



5. The area of Famagusta known as Varosha has a rich history of prosperity despite of long-standing conflicts in the region. In the 1970s, however, the Turkish invaded and claimed the tourist territory as their own. They erected fences with warnings and forbade the return of any residents. After decades of disuse the structures have fallen into a serious state of disrepair and are in many cases no longer habitable by anyone save the sea turtles which call some beach-side structures home.



6. A gulag is a strange type of ‘city’ – more like a nightmare town where work goes unrewarded and the pension plan is deadly. This Soviet gulag was used as a work and prison camp and still has remnant buildings and relics from its desertion. After all, it is difficult to turn something so structured and with such a storied past into anything else that might be more useful.



7. No list of abandoned cities and deserted towns can be complete without some discussion of one of the strangest and most infamous example: Centralia. This once-thriving town had a mine fire decades ago … but it never went out. Warning signs that something was still wrong included: smoking highways, heated underwater gas tanks and person-swallowing sinkholes. Over time most of the town’s residents have moved on though a few insist on staying despite the slowly-spreading and still-burning fire that creeps below.



8. The Quabbin Reservoir is the now the largest body of water in Massachusetts. However, the area it now occupies once had four small towns and a network of roads and rail tracks running through it – all of which were flooded or displaced by the filling of the area with water. While some public structures, memorials and graves were moved out of the way many still sit today at the bottom of this body of water. Some nearby structures sit above the waterline but were abandoned without the adjacent buildings that sustained their use.



9. Once the proud 150,000+ capital city of Azerbaijan this dense and thriving city was taken by the Armenians and utterly trashed, vandalized and then abandoned. However, the Armenians still claim the territory as their own so no one has returned to reclaim the wrecked and ravished ruins of the city. However, some explorers still make their way to photograph what is left of this city whose residents may never see it again.



10. Yashima is a high and open plateau on one of the main islands of Japan. During peak economic years in the 1980s investors decided to create a resort village complete with a half-dozen hotels, curio shops and a rail line to the top of the peak of the city. When the economy fell on harder times and they could not bring in the tourist dollars the entire village was shut down, leaving many shops with eerie remnant collections of collectible tourist goodies and leaving furniture and other relics in the hotels and other support buildings.



11. A sudden and devastating earthquake leveled or unbalanced virtually every major building in Beichuan, leaving thousands dead and tens of thousands displaced to public buildings in nearby cities. Due to the extent of the damage it is unclear whether this city will be rebuilt or simply left to go to ruin – its reconstruction would require the leveling of most or all of the buildings that remain from the disaster.



12. Off the coast of Azerbaijan sits what remains of one of the strangest organically-evolved cities in the world. Oily Rocks started with a single path out over the water, built on the backs of ships sunken to serve as foundations. This system of paths grew and evolve to serve the oil-drilling industry and eventually were widened to create space for houses, schools, libraries and shops for the workers and their families. Today, most of it sits abandoned and some paths and buildings have sunk back under the surf never to be seen again.



13. After the detouring of a river which permanently rose the water level in and around this haunting town in Argentina as deserted. Perhaps most striking is the fact that many of the structures now, once again, sit above the waterline. Bare dehydrated trees still line the streets in the parts of the town that sit up over the water and are still without inhabitants.



14. The mysterious deserted village of Castelnuovo is thinly guarded by a half-broken fence. Located in Tuscany up on a little hill near Arezzo, one of the strangest features of the abandonment is strange quizzes scrawled on the walls of many of the buildings since the area’s desertion – Myst-like puzzles in a likewise abandoned village.



15. The deserted walled medieval town of Craco had a village located on its site as far back as the 500s AD. Over time, however, it was plagued by, well, plagues … as well as agricultural droughts, rogue banditry and finally insurmountable seismic activity which threatened to bring the whole town down. In the 1960s the last of the residents were evacuated for fear of an earthquake that could level the entire site and the town has since sat entirely abandoned high up on a 400-foot cliff.



16. Bodie was a quintessential frontier town of the Old West, complete with dozens of saloons, a red light district and a Chinatown. Stories of its history include tales of barroom brawls, stagecoach robberies and other Wild West debauchery. Founded during the Gold Rush the town thrived through the early 20th Century but was subsequently deserted and now is preserved and partially restored to its original state.



17. Humberstone Chile was built around the rush to produce sodium nitrate as fertilizer. However, when the American economy went bust during the Great Depression demand dropped and by the time the world economy had recovered sufficiently most interested had shifted to other fertilizers leaving this town quite literally in the dust. Structures left behind include an abandoned swimming pool, schools, grocers a market place and a theater.
    

18. A thriving coal-mining town sold by Sweden to the former Soviet Union in the early 1920s fell victim to a classic case of soviet state-run company decision-making. Once the town was deemed insufficiently necessary and productive for the government’s purposes it was summarily and suddenly evacuated in its entirety. The population left many relics and furniture items behind which tourists can see through the windows – but not up close as visitors are forbidden (for safety reasons) from entering.



19. The town of Sewell was constructed at the dizzying height of 6,000 feet high up in the Andes Mountains in Chile. Once home to 15,000 workers who traveled most of the way by rail and then walked the rest the town has now been abandoned for decades. The brightly-colored buildings, however, largely still stand – a tribute to what was once the most extensive underground copper mine in the world.





20. Little is available online about this picturesque deserted mountain mountain with brightly painted doors and largely intact structures.



21. The full story of this deserted village is not fully known but many have speculated that it was built to be an exquisite and futuristic holiday village on the water. However, its construction was plagued with problems and was eventually haunted. The strange fiberglass shells of its smoothly circular structures have slowly weathered and in many cases fallen off. Local culture believes that the place may be haunted and locals avoid it.



22. Kowloon Walled City was a loophole, a glitch never meant to exist. It grew organically devoid of building codes and largely absent of legal oversight, a kind of organic tent city times one thousand. As it grew without rules some areas were cut off entirely from natural light and air, crime ebbed and flowed and everything grew densely packed until the government finally intervened – evacuating the city and demolishing what remained.
    

The answer is:

1)Abandoned Medieval Town of Balestrino, Italy
2)Abandoned City & Commune of Oradour, France
3)Abandoned Island City of Hashima, Japan
4)Abandoned Desert Ghost Town of Kolmanskop, Africa
5)Abandoned Area of Varosha, Cyprus
6)Abandoned Gulag Concentration Camp
7)Abandoned Town of Centralia, Pennsylvania
8)Abandoned Flooded City of Quabbin, Massachusetts
9)Abandoned War-Torn City of Agdam, Azerbaijan
10)Abandoned Resort Town of Yashima, Japan
11)Abandoned Disaster City of Beichuan, China
12)Deserted Floating City of Oily Rocks, Azerbaijan
13)Deserted Village of Villa Lago Epecun, Argentina
14)Deserted Town of Castelnuovo de’ Sabbioni, Italy
15)Deserted Walled Medieval Town of Craco, Italy
16)Wild West Ghost Town of Bodie, California
17)Deserted Ghost City of Humberstone, Chile
18)Deserted Mining Town of Pyramiden, Sweden
19)Deserted Mining Town of Sewell, Chile
20)Abandoned Mountain Town of Sardinia, Italy
21)Deserted Resort Village of San Zhi, Taiwan
22)Deserted Walled City of Kowloon, Hong Kong