Abandoned Places In The World (2026)

Do you love creepy old buildings? Have you ever wanted to explore a ghost town? You could be looking for the scare factor or you could simply have a passion for history. In either case, you might enjoy visiting some of the interesting abandoned places in the world. Picture yourself standing in the halls of an abandoned hospital. A cool breeze rushes past with moans that make you wonder if it's haunted. Imagine driving along a quiet back road and suddenly coming across a town. Once bustling, it now crumbles like the dreams of the workers long since gone. Picture the remnants of a centuries-old castle -- that Mother Nature herself is now reclaiming. What the abandoned places in the world can offer you is a sense of beauty. Or sadness. Or a chill that runs up your spine. Because although these places might be deserted, they are far from dead. They live on in our memories and our imagination. You might not be fortunate enough to have interesting abandoned places near you to explore. In this case, check out the list below. On it, you'll discover some of the world's most impressive abandoned places. But don't leave it at that. There might still be more hidden right in your own backyard. Feel free to tell us about your favorite abandoned places in the comments.

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

Hashima Island, also called Gunkanjima (meaning "Battleship Island"), is one of 505 uninhabited islands in the Nagasaki Prefecture. It's located about 15 kilometers from the city of Nagasaki itself. Between 1887 and 1974, the island was used as a coal mining facility, and people lived there. Mitsubishi bought the island in 1890 for a mining project. The aim of that project was to retrieve coal from the bottom of the sea. They built Japan's first large concrete building in 1916, a block of apartments. This was housing for their burgeoning ranks of workers. The massive apartment blocks had a second function: to protect against typhoon destruction. An unsavory detail is that many of those laborers were forcibly recruited from other parts of Asia - Japan's refusal to clearly acknowledge this held back the island's World Heritage status for decades, and is even now controversial. As petroleum replaced coal in Japan in the 1960s, coal mines began shutting down all over the country. Hashima's mines were no exception to this trend. Mitsubishi officially announced the closing of the mine in 1974. Today it is empty and bare, earning it the name of Ghost Island. Travel to Hashima became possible again in 2009, following more than 20 years of closure.

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

Pripyat is an abandoned city in the so-called Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine. The former town is one of the most famous abandoned places in the world. The city started out in 1970 to offer nearby housing for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant workers. That location was also its death sentence. In 1986, just before the Chernobyl disaster, its population had been around 50,000. After that nuclear accident, Pripyat evacuated all its inhabitants within just two days. For roughly a decade, organized tours of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Pripyat were open to international visitors. That stopped in February 2022. When Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Chernobyl was one of the first sites they captured — Russian troops occupied the Exclusion Zone for approximately five weeks before withdrawing on April 1, 2022. Reports from after the withdrawal documented trenches dug into contaminated Red Forest soil, looted research laboratories, and roughly 22,000 hectares of the zone burned during the occupation. Bridges over several rivers in the eastern part of the zone were destroyed, leaving large sections inaccessible. Ukrainian authorities have kept Pripyat closed to tourists since the invasion began, and there is no announced timeline for reopening. The doors of most of the buildings are open to reduce the risk to visitors. Tourists can visit almost all of them, though only with a guide. The city of Chernobyl, located a few miles from Pripyat, offers some accommodation. These include a hotel, many apartment buildings, and a local lodge. Some of these serve as a permanent residence for the watch crew. Other accommodations are open to outside visitors.

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

Kadykchan is a ghost town in Russia. Construction on it began during the World War II. It housed workers of the coal mines and their families. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, mining became increasingly unprofitable. The final blow came in 1996, when six men died as a result of explosion in one of the coal mine. Because of the continuing danger, the mines closed down. The town's 12,000 inhabitants were evacuated to other places, leaving the town empty and silent.

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

Centralia is a ghost town in Pennsylvania in the United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to only 4 today. How did it become one of the world's most famous abandoned places? A mine fire has been burning beneath the borough since 1962 - for well over half a century by now. There are several theories how the fire started. One of them asserts that in May 1962, Centralia Borough Council decided to clean up the town landfill. For this, they hired five members of the volunteer fire brigade.The firefighters followed a then-standard procedure. They set the dump on fire, intending to let it burn down the trash for a time. However, the team was unable to extinguish the fire after it served its purpose. The fire kept burning, reaching lower levels of the dump. It might eventually have gone out on its own, but then misfortune struck. The burn spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Over the years, all attempts to control the fire failed. It simply continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Several people began reporting adverse health effects. These were due to the byproducts of the fire: Carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and unwholesomely low oxygen levels. In 1984, Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted the buyout offers. But a few families opted to stay despite warnings from state officials. In 2013, a new agreement allowed the remaining population of 7 to live out their lives in Centralia. Five residents remain in Centralia as of 2025, living under the 2013 agreement that lets them stay for life.

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

Kowloon used to be one of the areas of Hong Kong city. In the late 1970s, the Walled City began to grow rapidly. Square buildings folded up into one another, owing to thousands of modifications. Virtually no architects or engineers oversaw this building frenzy. Labyrinthine corridors ran through the city, often clogged with refuse. Some ran along former streets, others through upper floors and between buildings. Sunlight rarely reached the lower levels. There were only two rules for construction. The first was that electricity had to be provided, so that people would not need to start cooking fires. The second rule was that buildings could be no higher than fourteen stories, because of the nearby airport. By the early 1960s, Kowloon Walled City had an estimated population of 35,000. The City was notorious for its excess of brothels, casinos, opium dens, cocaine parlors, food courts serving dog meat, and secret factories. In 1987, officials announced a decision to demolish the Walled City and resettle its inhabitants. At that time, it had 50,000 inhabitants on 26,000 sq. meters (31,000 sq. yards). Its population density was therefore extreme, at 1,923,077 per sq. km. This made it one of the planet's most densely populated urban areas. Kowloon Walled City demonstrates that not all abandoned places in the world stay just as people left it. After the demolition in 1992-1993, a park arose in its place, with construction starting in May 1994. Today, the Kowloon Walled City Park has taken its place.

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

Oradour-sur-Glan is a town in west-central France. It has one of the saddest histories of abandoned places in the world. The original village was destroyed on June 10, 1944. On this day, a German Waffen-SS company murdered 643 of its inhabitants. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site. The ruins of the old Oradour-sur-Glan are being maintained as a memorial, as is the cemetary. The site has a highly-rated museum.

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

Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia. It used to be a small mining village. Today, it is a popular tourist destination. The joint firm NAMDEB (Namibia-De Beers) offers travel services for the place. The village of Kolmanskop developed after the discovery of diamonds in the area in 1908. The constructions sheltered mine workers from the harsh environment of the Namib Desert. The village had a layout similar to a German town, and had generous facilities. These included a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theater and sport-hall, casino, and an ice factory. The town also hosted the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere. The town declined after World War I as diamond prices crashed. Most operations moved from Kolmanskop to Oranjemund. As a result, the last inhabitants left it in 1956. Since then, restorations recovered part of the town. Owing to the geological forces of the desert, tourists can now walk through houses knee-deep in sand.

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.