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Abandoned Places In The World (2026)
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Key Topics in This Guide
- 1What's Changed Since This List Was First Published — covered in detail below
- 2Why People Abandon Places — covered in detail below
- 3The Appeal of the World's Abandoned Places — covered in detail below
- 4Gunkanjima, Japan — covered in detail below
- 5Quick Facts: Gunkanjima — covered in detail below
- 6Pripyat, Ukraine — covered in detail below
- 7
What's Changed Since This List Was First Published
This article first ran in January 2010. The places themselves haven't moved, but their stories have. Pripyat was occupied by Russian troops in 2022 and remains closed to visitors. Hashima Island became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 and was used as the villain's lair in Skyfall. Centralia's Graffiti Highway was buried under dirt in 2020 to discourage trespassers. And Agdam, in Azerbaijan, is the only place on this list that has begun being un-abandoned — Azerbaijan recaptured the territory in 2020 and reconstruction is now underway.
What follows is the original list, updated with what's happened since.
Why People Abandon Places
When I started on this post, I was thinking that there are not that many abandoned places in the world, at least not at the size of cities. Of course, I knew there are many villages, farms and just lonely houses all around the world. But when thousands of people leave, leaving a whole city dead -- that's a real tragedy. There are mainly two reasons why people suddenly - or little by little - leave a place. They can arise even if they lived there for years or even generations. First, there are environmental dangers. Second, there are economic factors. Both together explain why you can find the biggest number of abandoned villages and farms in two particular places. These are the Unites States and the countries of the former USSR.The Appeal of the World's Abandoned Places
Visiting abandoned places is getting more and more popular these days. Consequently, many tourist agencies offer dedicated tours. On these special interest tours, people can meet the ghost cities and villages face to face. I myself have never been on any of these and, frankly speaking, I don't want to. I think we should leave the ghosts in peace. This goes especially for places like Pripyat where horrible tragedy took place. Still, hobbies and tastes differ, and that's fine. Surfing online, we can find photographer's websites and galleries fully devoted to abandoned places. The aptly-titled Abandoned Places - itself a design experiment - or Troy Paiva's Lost America photo stream are just two good examples. What just adds to the flavor is that these online spaces themselves may become abandoned and erode away, fragile relics of a bygone internet. It's unavoidable when you keep on updating a post like this over the years. The world's famous abandoned places can look charming or they can look frightening. In the selection below, we tried to present both these aspects. The abandoned cities of the former USSR look eerily like clones, for instance. And they resemble the concentration camps of World War II. Other locations have great natural beauty. In any case, that's the history we should know about, so let's get started.Gunkanjima, Japan
Quick Facts: Gunkanjima
- Location: Off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan (15 km from the city)
- Also known as: Hashima Island, Battleship Island
- Active years: 1887–1974
- Peak population: ~5,259 — once the most densely populated place on Earth
- Current status: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015; open to guided boat tours from Nagasaki
- Notable appearances: Skyfall , Attack on Titan (2015 live-action film), No Time to Die (referenced)





Since the original version of this article ran, the island's profile has changed considerably. In 2015, UNESCO added Hashima to its World Heritage List as part of the "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution" group — a designation that came with controversy, since the listing initially understated the use of forced Korean and Chinese laborers during the war years. Japan later agreed to acknowledge the history more directly at the site's information centers. The island also had a film moment: it served as the backdrop for Raoul Silva's hideout in Skyfall , which sent a wave of tourists looking to walk the same crumbling concrete. Today, regular boat tours depart from Nagasaki harbor, though visitors can only access a small designated path on the southern end. The rest of the island remains too dangerous to enter.
Pripyat, Ukraine
Quick Facts: Pripyat
- Location: Northern Ukraine, ~110 km from Kyiv, ~3 km from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
- Founded: 1970
- Peak population: ~49,000 (April 1986)
- Evacuated: April 27, 1986, in approximately 36 hours
- Current status: Closed to tourists since February 2022 due to Russian invasion of Ukraine
- Cleanup projected to last until: 2065








April 26, 2026 marked the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. The site that began this article as a Cold War cautionary tale has become something else over those 40 years: a wildlife sanctuary studied by international scientists, a tourist destination during a brief decade of peace, a war zone again, and now a place whose buildings are crumbling faster than ever — partly from age, partly from neglect during wartime. Photographer Pierpaolo Mittica, who has documented Pripyat since 2002, has said books and posters that were intact when he started visiting are now disintegrating into dust. There may not be much left to photograph in another decade.
Kadykchan, Russia
Quick Facts: Kadykchan
- Location: Magadan Oblast, Russian Far East
- Founded: During World War II (mid-1940s)
- Peak population: ~12,000
- Final blow: 1996 mine explosion that killed six workers
- Current status: Almost fully abandoned; isolated and largely closed to foreign visitors since 2022







Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent sanctions and visa restrictions, independent reporting from Russia's Far East has become significantly harder. The Kolyma region — of which Kadykchan is a part — was already remote and difficult to reach. It's now functionally off the map for most journalists, photographers, and tourists. What we know about Kadykchan today comes mostly from Russian-language documentary projects and intermittent drone footage that surfaces online.
Centralia, United States
Quick Facts: Centralia
- Location: Columbia County, Pennsylvania
- Founded: 1866
- Peak population: Over 2,700
- Fire started: May 1962 — still burning 64 years later
- Current population: 5 residents (as of 2025)
- Fire spread rate: 50–75 feet per year, covering ~400 acres
- Estimated time fire could continue burning: 100–250 more years
- Estimated cost to extinguish: ~$660 million
- Cultural footprint: Inspired the 2006 horror film Silent Hill






Two things have changed about Centralia since this list was first published. First, the Graffiti Highway — a stretch of Route 61 closed in 1993 that became a magnet for spray-paint artists and Instagram tourists — was buried under truckloads of dirt in April 2020 to discourage trespassers. The site that drew thousands of visitors a year is now a covered hillside. Second, the fire's projected lifespan keeps getting longer. Recent estimates suggest it could burn for another 100 to 250 years, and the burn zone is projected to potentially expand from its current 400 acres to as many as 3,700. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection monitors the situation through more than 2,000 boreholes. Centralia is one of approximately 40 active mine fires in Pennsylvania alone — a statistic that puts the unique tragedy of this single town into broader context.
Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, China
Quick Facts: Kowloon Walled City
- Location: Kowloon City District, Hong Kong
- Active years: Roughly 1898–1993 (most densely populated phase 1970s–1980s)
- Peak population: ~33,000–50,000 residents in 6.4 acres (one of the densest places ever recorded)
- Demolished: 1993–1994
- Replaced by: Kowloon Walled City Park (opened 1995)
- Cultural legacy: Major influence on cyberpunk aesthetic in film and games





Though the physical structure was demolished more than three decades ago, the Walled City has had a strange afterlife in popular culture. Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's 1993 photo book City of Darkness documented daily life in the final years and has become a cult reference for designers, filmmakers, and game developers. The Walled City's tangle of corridors, exposed wiring, neon signage, and stacked architecture is the visual DNA of cyberpunk — most visibly in Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, and the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. From 2009 until its closure in 2019, an arcade complex in Kawasaki, Japan called Warehouse Kawasaki recreated the Walled City's interiors at full scale, drawing visitors who wanted to walk through the place they'd only seen in photographs. The City itself is gone. The aesthetic it created is everywhere.
Oradour-Sur-Glane, France
Quick Facts: Oradour-Sur-Glane
- Location: Haute-Vienne department, west-central France
- Destroyed: June 10, 1944, by Waffen-SS troops
- Victims: 643 villagers killed (men, women, and children)
- Status: Preserved as a memorial since 1946 by decree of Charles de Gaulle
- Memorial center: Centre de la Mémoire opened in 1999
- 80th anniversary commemoration: June 10, 2024







Two developments are worth noting in any 2026 retelling of Oradour. First, the Centre de la Mémoire — a museum and interpretive center built at the entrance to the preserved ruins — opened in 1999 and has become the primary way most visitors now encounter the site. Second, the village reached an inflection point in February 2023 when Robert Hébras, one of the last living survivors of the massacre, died at age 97. Hébras had spent the post-war decades giving testimony at the ruins and became a central figure in Franco-German reconciliation. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited the site together — a moment that would have been unimaginable in 1944. June 10, 2024 marked the 80th anniversary of the massacre. With Hébras gone, future commemorations will have to make do with recorded testimony.
Kolmanskop, Namibia
Quick Facts: Kolmanskop
- Location: Namib Desert, southern Namibia, near Lüderitz
- Founded: 1908, following diamond discovery
- Peak years: 1910s–1920s
- Abandoned: Final residents left in 1956
- Current status: Open to guided tours via NAMDEB permits
- Featured in: The Mummy Returns and numerous music videos and photography projects







Of all the places on this list, Kolmanskop has had perhaps the most successful afterlife as a destination. The sand-filled interiors of its abandoned German colonial buildings — drifts piled to window height inside otherwise intact rooms — have become one of the most photographed ghost-town scenes in the world. National Geographic features, photography workshops, and a steady stream of Instagram travel content have pushed Kolmanskop into a different category from the other places on this list: a ghost town that has effectively become a working tourism site. Visits require a permit obtained through NAMDEB, the joint venture between the Namibian government and De Beers. Photographers seeking interior access at sunrise or sunset need a separate special permit.
Frequently Asked Questions
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