9 Abandoned Places That Look Like Film Sets

Ruins photograph beautifully, and that is exactly the problem. A good share of what scrolls past under the word “abandoned” was never a place at all, just a machine’s guess at which staircase your eye wants, a flood we have written about before. The nine below are real. Each has a date, a reason and a paper trail.

They also vanish if you wait. Beijing’s Wonderland, the half-finished fairy-tale castle photographers adored because farmers had planted corn between its turrets, was demolished in 2013, and an outlet mall opened on the ground in 2015. So we checked what is still up. Without further ado.

1. Kolmanskop, Namibia

Let’s kick things off in the Namib Desert. In April 1908 a railway worker named Zacharias Lewala picked up a glittering stone near Lüderitz and handed it to his German supervisor, August Stauch, who knew a diamond when he saw one. The town that erupted from that moment had a ballroom, a casino, an ice factory and the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere. By 1912 the field turned out close to 11.7 percent of the world’s diamonds. Then richer ground was found further south, and by 1956 the place was empty. The dunes walked in, and sand now stands waist-deep in the parlours. Entry is by permit through the site’s own booking office, and a sunrise-to-sunset photography pass costs about double the morning ticket.

2. Bodie, California

Gold turned up here in 1859. By 1880 roughly 10,000 people lived at 8,375 feet in a town with a homicide problem and no trees. Fires in 1892 and 1932 took about ninety percent of the original two thousand structures, the second reportedly started by a boy with a box of matches. Fewer than 200 buildings survive. California bought the site in 1962 and keeps it in a state it officially calls arrested decay, meaning roofs get patched and nothing gets prettied up. Dishes sit on tables. Adult admission to the state park runs eight dollars, and from November the only way in is on skis, snowshoes or a snowmobile.

3. Hashima Island, Japan

Sixteen acres of rock nine miles off Nagasaki, walled in concrete until it looked like a warship at anchor, hence Gunkanjima. Mitsubishi mined coal under the seabed and stacked the workforce vertically, raising Japan’s first large reinforced concrete apartment block in 1916. In 1959 the population hit 5,259 on 6.3 hectares, roughly 835 people per hectare and the highest density ever recorded anywhere. The mine shut in January 1974 and everybody was gone by 20 April. Korean and Chinese labourers were forced to work those shafts during the war, a history Japan committed to explaining when the island joined the UNESCO list in 2015. Sam Mendes borrowed the silhouette for the villain’s hideout in Skyfall and rebuilt it as a set, because nobody sends a crew into those stairwells. Landing tours sail from Nagasaki, keep to one short walkway, and get cancelled when the swell picks up.

4. Craco, Italy

A Basilicata hill town on a clay ridge, in the records since 1060, hollowed out in a single decade. In 1963 a landslide widely blamed on trenching for new sewer and water lines pushed the last 1,800 residents into a new town in the valley. A flood in 1972 and the earthquake of 1980 finished off any thought of moving back. What is left is a Norman tower, a gutted church and a skeleton of streets on a hillside that keeps sliding. Mel Gibson filmed part of The Passion of the Christ up there in 2004, and Quantum of Solace shot on the same ridge four years later. You can walk it with a guide, in a hard hat. Nobody goes in alone.

5. The Red Sands Sea Forts, England

Seven steel boxes on concrete stilts, planted in the Thames Estuary between 23 July and 3 September 1943 to shoot at German aircraft and mine-laying boats. Guy Maunsell designed them to be floated out and sunk into position, and they still stand about 90 feet above the water six miles off the Isle of Sheppey. The army walked away in 1956. Pirate radio moved in next. In 1964 Screaming Lord Sutch put a transmitter into a tower of the neighbouring Shivering Sands group, and the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act shut the offshore stations down in 1967. One Shivering Sands tower is gone, struck in fog by a 295-ton cargo ship in June 1963. Boats run out from Whitstable to circle the group, and the catwalks rotted off decades ago.

6. The Buzludzha Monument, Bulgaria

Why it’s weird: the Bulgarian Communist Party built itself a concrete flying saucer on a mountaintop and lined the inside with more than two million pieces of mosaic. It opened in 1981 and drew over two million visitors that decade. After 1989 the state locked the doors and walked off. Water got in. The roof came apart and the mosaics began sliding off the walls in sheets. The Getty Foundation funded a conservation survey in 2019 and emergency stabilisation in 2020, and by 2022 crews had cleared the dangerous roof debris and sheltered the dome. The exterior is free to visit. The interior stays sealed, and the conservators would very much like that respected.

7. Pripyat, Ukraine

Purpose-built in 1970 for the staff of the Chernobyl plant, with a cinema, a pool and a new amusement park due to open on 1 May 1986. Reactor four exploded on 26 April. The next afternoon 49,000 residents were loaded onto buses and told to pack for three days. Nobody came back. The Ferris wheel never had its opening day and has been photographed a few million times since. Exclusion zone tourism was a going concern until 2022, when Russian forces occupied and then withdrew from the area. Ukraine suspended every visitor pass and revoked the operator licences, and the zone now sits under martial law with unexploded ordnance in the soil. Do not try it.

8. Varosha, Cyprus

In the early 1970s this quarter of Famagusta was the glamour address of the eastern Mediterranean, a wall of new high-rise hotels along the sand with a guest list running to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Brigitte Bardot. Turkish forces reached the city in August 1974. People left expecting to be home within the week, and the army fenced the district off with the shops still stocked and the cars still parked. It stayed sealed for 46 years. In October 2020 Turkish Cypriot authorities opened a strip of beach and a handful of streets to visitors on foot and by bicycle, a decision the UN Security Council condemned. Everything else remains behind wire.

9. Michigan Central Station, Detroit

The last train out was Amtrak 353 to Chicago, leaving at 11:40 in the morning on 5 January 1988. Behind it stood a Beaux-Arts terminal by the architects of Grand Central, open to the weather and destined to become the definitive photograph of American industrial decline. Trees grew in the waiting room. Ford bought the wreck in 2018 and spent six years and close to a billion dollars putting the limestone and plaster back. On 6 June 2024 Diana Ross, Jack White and Big Sean played a free concert out front, with Eminem turning up at the end. The doors opened to the public the following morning. That is an ending these places almost never get.