We have seen ghostly towns in many hollywood movies that have dusty, rusty and old buildings. But those aren’t really describing a real ghost town. Today goverments spend millions and billions to form new cities. But sometimes those cities just end up being empty, because of different reasons. Many things can define a city, from its food and culture to its residents. But what happens when you take that all away? Today we came , with a list of 10 such abandoned cities.
10 –Peace Village-North Korea
Photo credit:Elitereaders
It is situated in the North’s half of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Also known in North Korea as Peace Village,it has been widely referred to as ‘Propaganda Village’.As a way to intimidate South Korea and put on a front,North Korea’s creepy fake civilian village fools no one. Peace Village was built after the Korean War. Builted to attract enemy bombers away from the real city.
9 –Ordos Kangbashi-China
Photo credit:videoblocks
Ordos Kangbashi is a new city of world-class architecture, extravagant public plazas, international scale stadiums, and seas of crisp new housing that rose up from the barren deserts of China’s Inner Mongolia in less than a decade.It was built to house 300,000 people, but only 70,000 people moved into the city. Eventually, those people started to trickle out as well. The city stopped building and went bankrupt. Today, it is largely a ghost town, with most of the buildings completely empty.
8 –Kennecott-Alaska
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Kennecott, also known as Kennicott and Kennecott Mines, is an abandoned mining camp in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area in the U.S. state of Alaska that was the center of activity for several copper mines.Nearly $200 million worth of copper was processed in Kennecott. The residents cleared out once the copper resources started to dwindle and most of the buildings have now been abandoned for around 60 years.
7 –Kolmanskop-Namibia
Photo credit:trover
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the Namib in southern Namibia, 10 kilometres inland from the port town of Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. Kolmanskop was built to house workers at a nearby diamond mine. The town was abandoned by the mid-1950s and since then the desert has consumed it, almost filling many once grand houses with sand.
6 –Bodie-California
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Bodie is a former gold-mining town and State Historic Park in California’s Bodie Hills, near the Nevada border. Once home to 10,000 people, Bodie boomed in the late 1880s after gold was found in the hills surrounding Mono Lake. Not long after though, Bodie transitioned into a period of steady decline until reaching ghost town status around 1915.
5 –Varosha-Cyprus
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Varosha is an abandoned southern quarter of the Cypriot city of Famagusta. According to BBC, Varosha has remained abandoned and under the control of the Turkish Military since 1974. It has been fenced off, and nobody but military and UN personnel are allowed into the once beautiful tourist destination. There have been numerous attempts to broker a deal that will once again open up Varosha, but nothing has been agreed upon.
4 –Tianducheng-China
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Tianducheng, also called Sky City, is a housing estate in the suburbs of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Construction at Tianducheng began around 2007. Its central feature is 108-metre-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower and 31 km² of Parisian style architecture, fountains and landscaping.With the capacity for over 10,000 residents, the city has remained mostly abandoned except for the employees of a nearby French themed amusement park, according to City Lab.
3 – Pripyat-Ukraine
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Pripyat or Prypiat is a ghost city in northern Ukraine, near the Ukraine–Belarus border. Named after the nearby Pripyat River, the city was founded on February 4, 1970, as the ninth nuclear city in the Soviet Union. A city specifically built to house the workers at a nearby nuclear power plant, Pripyat had more than 13,000 apartments, schools for 5,000 children. After the reactor blew on April 26, 1986, releasing toxic radiation into the surrounding area, the entire city was evacuated.
2 –Hashima Island-Japan
Photo credit:allthatsinteresting
Hashima Island is an abandoned offshore mining facility, also known as Gunkanjima or Battleship Island. Originally developed as a residence for people working in the undersea coal mines in 1887, Hashima Island quickly expanded into an island of concrete high-rise buildings housing over 5,000 people. But the mine eventually closed in 1974 when Japan moved away from coal power and with the jobs went the residents
1 –Ashgabat-Turkmenistan
Photo credit:afsona-travel
Ashgabat is the capital of Turkmenistan. It’s known for its white marble buildings and grandiose national monuments. But dont get fooled by its beautiful marble monuments and buildings because today Ashgabat is also called as “the city of dead”. President Saparmurat Niyazov planned to create a “golden era of Turkmenistan” in 1991 with the building of Ashgabat. He did so by erecting buildings that broke records, like becoming the city with the most marble buildings in the world. But today the city is largely a ghost town because of the country’s isolated culture, which Niyazov implemented. Most of its marble buildings are still empty and nobody actually lives in the large portion of the city. Are there any ghostly towns left, that are not on this list . Tell us in the comment section down below.
