The Most Beautiful Abandoned Places in the World
25 places in 16 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful abandoned places in the world are Houtouwan Village (People's Republic of China), Craco (Italy) and Kolmanskop (Namibia). The list covers 25 abandoned places in 16 countries. Italy has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Abandoned places hold a particular kind of beauty: the moment after people leave, when a building stops being used and starts being looked at. Stone villages emptied by a landslide, mines cut into mountains and sea cliffs on a scale nobody would attempt now, bridges left standing after the railway has gone. Time adds what no architect planned, such as ivy over a whole fishing village, rust and brick in the same frame, a concrete arch that sinks and resurfaces with the level of a lake.
In this collection, Kharanaq in Iran is a mud-brick village on a ridge, and Hashima off Nagasaki, the coal-mining island known as Gunkanjima, has stood empty since the 1970s. The Taushubetsu River Bridge in Hokkaido appears and disappears with the reservoir around it. Craco in southern Italy was evacuated after a landslide, Houtouwan on the Shengsi Islands is disappearing under green, and Bodie in California is a gold-rush town kept as it was left.
The places here were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens into separate pages by country and by type, from ghost towns to abandoned mines and railways.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Houtouwan Village | Abandoned village | People's Republic of China | |
| 2 | Craco | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 3 | Kolmanskop | Ghost town | Namibia | |
| 4 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 5 | Taushubetsu River Bridge | Abandoned railway | Japan | |
| 6 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | Turkey | |
| 7 | Pentedattilo | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 8 | Villa Epecuén | Abandoned village | Argentina | |
| 9 | Uyuni Train Cemetery | Abandoned railway | Bolivia | |
| 10 | Gamsutl | Abandoned village | Russia | |
| 11 | Kharanaq | Abandoned village | Iran | |
| 12 | Bodie | Ghost town | United States | |
| 13 | Grytviken | Ghost town | South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands | |
| 14 | Pyramiden | Ghost town | Norway | |
| 15 | Kinzua Bridge | Abandoned railway | United States | |
| 16 | Khndzoresk | Abandoned village | Armenia | |
| 17 | Baia | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 18 | Porto Flavia | Abandoned mine | Italy | |
| 19 | Sado Mine | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 20 | Corta Atalaya | Abandoned mine | Spain | |
| 21 | Usui Daisan Bridge (Megane Bridge) | Abandoned railway | Japan | |
| 22 | Anavatos | Abandoned village | Greece | |
| 23 | Vatheia | Abandoned village | Greece | |
| 24 | Remains of the 13 Levels | Abandoned mine | Taiwan | |
| 25 | Longteng Broken Bridge | Abandoned railway | Taiwan |
01 Houtouwan Village
People's Republic of China30.727° N 122.820° E
Milkomède · CC BY-SA 4.0 The village is young by the standards of abandoned places. It grew up in the 1950s and at its height held more than two thousand fishermen and around five hundred homes packed tightly into the cove. From the 1990s the island's isolation began to tell: schooling, supplies and work were all on the mainland, and families left one by one for Shanghai and the coast.
Did you know? In 2002 Houtouwan ceased to exist as a separate village and was formally merged into neighbouring Minfu village.
02 Craco
Italy40.379° N 16.440° E
Maurizio Moro5153 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The site is ancient: tombs of the 8th century BC have been found here, and the name appears in 1060 as Graculum. From the 12th century it was a feudal stronghold, and under Frederick II its tower held Lombard prisoners. The town prospered in later centuries, with four large palazzi and more than two thousand inhabitants at its peak in the 16th century. Its decline came from the ground itself.
Did you know? In 1861 Craco was taken by brigand bands led by Carmine Crocco.
03 Kolmanskop
Namibia · 9.5 km from Lüderitz26.704° S 15.232° E
Image by chrisstenger from Pixabay What rose on that dune wasn't a mining camp so much as an outpost of Wilhelmine Germany dropped into the Namib. By 1912 Kolmanskop was producing close to a tenth of the world's diamonds by weight, and the wealth showed: a ballroom with a stage, a casino, a school, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and — stranger than all of it — a hospital holding the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. It wasn't there for broken bones.
Did you know? That southern line survived only two years before South African troops destroyed it in 1915 during the First World War.
04 Hashima Island
Japan · 20.5 km from Nagasaki32.628° N 129.738° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay To house the miners, the company built in concrete to withstand typhoons. A seven-storey apartment block of 1916 was Japan's first large reinforced-concrete building, and over the next half-century the island gained more apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, a town hall, a cinema, a swimming pool, shops, communal baths and rooftop gardens.
Did you know? Mitsubishi kept ownership of the deserted island until 2002, when it handed it over to the town of Takashima.
05 Taushubetsu River Bridge
Japan43.416° N 143.189° E
Chatama · CC BY-SA 3.0 It was built in 1937 for the Shihoro Line of the national railways and went into service in 1939, when the line was extended to Tokachi-Mitsumata. In 1955 the Nukabira Dam was built on the Otofuke River, and the stretch of line through the future lake was rerouted around it. The rails were taken up, but the arches were simply left where they stood. The whole Shihoro Line closed in 1987.
Did you know? In 2020 scant snow and rain kept the reservoir so low that the bridge stayed above water into October, unseen in some twenty years.
06 Kayaköy
Turkey36.577° N 29.087° E
Nikodem Nijaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 The site has a long pedigree. In antiquity there was a Lycian town here called Karmylessos, and the name survived in shortened form as Lebessos and then Levissi. By the early twentieth century the town was a prosperous Greek Orthodox community of roughly 6,500 people, with a market, a school and more than twenty churches and chapels.
Did you know? Most of the houses standing today date from the eighteenth century, and the residents were mainly skilled craftsmen.
07 Pentedattilo
Italy · 20.7 km from Reggio Calabria37.954° N 15.761° E
Codas · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Greek name is not decoration. This corner of Calabria kept a Greek-speaking population for many centuries, and Pentedattilo lost its Greek dialect only in the late nineteenth century. After the Normans took it in the twelfth century it passed through a series of feudal families, and its most notorious night belongs to them.
Did you know? In 1589 the fief was confiscated for debts and sold at auction for 15,180 ducats to the Alberti family, together with the title of marquis.
08 Villa Epecuén
Argentina · 8.9 km from Carhué37.132° S 62.810° W
Image by azorko from Pixabay The lake ended it. Heavy rains through the early 1980s raised the water level year after year, and on 6 November 1985 the water broke a nearby dam and then the embankment protecting the town. The water kept rising until it stood about ten metres deep, and the town was never rebuilt. For roughly twenty-five years Epecuén lay under the lake.
Did you know? The town's last resident, Pablo Novak, was the subject of the 2013 documentary Pablo's Villa.
09 Uyuni Train Cemetery
Cementerio de los Trenes
Bolivia · 2.4 km from Uyuni20.481° S 66.837° W
Image by jerzykwpodrozy from Pixabay Uyuni grew up around the railway. From the late nineteenth century British-backed companies built the line that became the Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia, carrying ore and salts from the mines of the interior down to the Pacific ports, and British engineers settled in the town while the track was laid. Uyuni became a junction and a depot where locomotives were serviced.
Did you know? The trains once carried sodium nitrate, salt, copper, tin, silver and gold from the Bolivian interior down to the Pacific.
10 Gamsutl
Russia42.303° N 46.997° E
Slavyanochka · CC BY-SA 4.0 The age of the village is not known. Local tradition and several writers count it among the oldest settlements in Dagestan, with estimates of two thousand years or more, and its name in Avar is usually translated as "at the foot of the khan's fortress".
Did you know? Traces of several faiths survive in the stones of the village, including Christian crosses, Persian-inscribed gravestones and Arabic lettering on house fronts.
11 Kharanaq
Iran32.346° N 54.666° E
مهدی خبره دست · CC BY-SA 4.0 The heart of the old village is its fortified core, a dense citadel of houses of two and three storeys, with watchtowers and a surrounding wall. Its origins are often traced to the Sasanian period, and local accounts claim a history of settlement stretching back thousands of years; neither can be dated precisely, but the place is certainly very old.
Did you know? The caravanserai, rebuilt under the Qajar prince Muhammad Vali Mirza, was registered as a national monument in 1998 and now houses travellers again.
12 Bodie
United States38.212° N 119.012° W
Image by Jmezes from Pixabay The story begins with a prospector, W. S. Bodey, who found gold here in 1859 and died in a blizzard that November without seeing what followed. The real rush came in 1876, when the Standard Company struck rich ore, and within three years Bodie had grown to somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people and about 2,000 structures.
Did you know? With no forest nearby, a narrow-gauge railway built in 1881 hauled lumber, cordwood and mine timbers from Mono Mills, south of Mono Lake.
13 Grytviken
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands54.281° S 36.508° W
Lexaxis7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 The cove takes its name — "Pot Bay" in Swedish — from the old English try-pots for rendering seal oil that the surveyor Johan Gunnar Andersson of the Swedish Antarctic Expedition found here in 1902. Two years later, on 16 November 1904, the Norwegian captain Carl Anton Larsen founded a whaling station on the spot for the Compañía Argentina de Pesca.
Did you know? One of the sealers' try pots that gave the cove its name survives in the South Georgia Museum, stamped by a London maker from Wapping Dock.
14 Pyramiden
Norway78.656° N 16.325° E
Bjoertvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0 The settlement was founded by Sweden in 1910 for coal mining on Spitsbergen and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927; since then it has belonged to the state mining company Arktikugol. At its height in the 1950s it had about 2,500 inhabitants. Between 1955 and 1998 some nine million tonnes of coal were taken from its mines.
Did you know? Large letters above the abandoned mine still carry the Soviet slogan Peace to the World, written in Russian.
15 Kinzua Bridge
United States41.763° N 78.588° W
Image by nicolasbulgarides from Pixabay The first bridge was designed by the engineer Octave Chanute and put up by the Elmira Bridge Company in 1882 in just 94 working days. Built of wrought iron on 20 towers, it was about 2,050 feet (625 m) long and 301 feet (92 m) high, and its promoters advertised it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World". It held the world height record for two years, until the Garabit viaduct in France opened in 1884.
Did you know? According to local lore, a bank robber hid 40,000 dollars in gold and currency under or near the bridge, and people came hunting for it.
16 Khndzoresk
Armenia · 34.5 km from Kapan39.512° N 46.434° E
Vahagn Grigoryan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cave village remained inhabited until the 1950s. At its peak, in 1914, Khndzoresk counted more than 8,300 inhabitants, making it one of the largest villages in the region. In the 1950s its people moved up to the plateau and built New Khndzoresk on the edge of the gorge, and the old caves came to be used as stables and storerooms. In the gorge stand the seventeenth-century church of St. Hripsime, the small cave church of St.
Did you know? Houses were stacked up the slopes so tightly that the flat roof of one dwelling often served as the courtyard of the house above it.
17 Baia
Italy · 14.9 km from Naples40.817° N 14.070° E
Joseph Meyer · Public domain What makes Baia extraordinary today is that the ancient town survives on two levels. On the hillside, a terraced complex of villas and baths climbs above the modern harbour, with mosaics, stucco and vaulted halls still in place. 5 metres across, was the widest in the world until the Pantheon in Rome surpassed it, and it is often cited as the oldest surviving concrete dome.
Did you know? Volcanic ground movement has left much of the ancient town several metres underwater in the bay.
18 Porto Flavia
Italy39.336° N 8.408° E
noname · CC BY 3.0 The mines of Masua, in the Iglesiente district, produced zinc and lead, and in 1922 they were bought by the Belgian Vieille Montagne company.
Did you know? The upper gallery, where the electric ore train ran, lies 37 metres above sea level, more than twice the height of the lower conveyor tunnel.
19 Sado Mine
Japan38.042° N 138.256° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0 As the workings went deeper and under the sea, flooding became the enemy. The shogunate sent convicts and vagrants from Edo to do the dangerous pumping work, and a sentence to Sado was understood to be a life sentence. After 1868 the Meiji government brought in Western engineers, sank Japan's first Western-style vertical shafts and built a flotation plant at Kitazawa; in 1896 the mine passed to Mitsubishi. Production peaked again around 1940.
Did you know? Hiroshige depicted the Sado gold mine in a woodblock print of 1853, when it was already one of Japan's most famous workings.
20 Corta Atalaya
Spain37.703° N 6.603° W
Vtornet · CC BY-SA 4.0 The pit lies in the Iberian Pyrite Belt, a band of metal-rich sulphide deposits formed on an ancient sea floor some 300 to 350 million years ago. People have mined copper, silver and gold here for about 5,000 years: Tartessians and Iberians from around 3000 BC, followed by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths and Moors.
Did you know? Ore trains left the pit through the Naya tunnel to join the Riotinto railway until 1984, after which lorries took over the haulage.
21 Usui Daisan Bridge (Megane Bridge)
Japan · 33.8 km from Maebashi36.358° N 138.698° E
Charlie fong · CC BY-SA 4.0 Work began in 1891 and the bridge was finished in 1893. It is 91 metres long and stands 31 metres above the riverbed on four arches, and it took around two million bricks to build — it is described as the largest brick arch bridge in Japan. The design is credited to the British engineer Charles Pownall, who had come to Japan in 1882, working with the Japanese engineer Furukawa Haruichi.
Did you know? Electrification in 1912 cut the climb over the pass from about 80 minutes to about 40, one of the earliest main-line electrifications in Japan.
22 Anavatos
Ανάβατος Χίου
Greece · 10.7 km from Chios38.401° N 26.020° E
RomkeHoekstra · CC BY-SA 4.0 Local tradition holds that the village was founded in the middle Byzantine period by workers brought to Chios to build the monastery of Nea Moni; another account links it to the pirate raids that plagued the island's west coast. The first core was a fortified enclosure on the summit, the Kastro, and under Genoese rule the defences were strengthened and the village spread down the eastern slope.
Did you know? The top of the three-storey building holds a chapel dedicated to the Presentation of the Virgin.
23 Vatheia
Βάθεια Λακωνίας
Greece36.454° N 22.466° E
KASPAR · CC BY-SA 4.0 The towers are the architecture of a feud. The Mani was a land of powerful clans, and in the villages of its southern end families built upwards, turning their homes into towers. Vatheia is first recorded by a Venetian mission in 1571, had around twenty households in 1618 and about two hundred inhabitants by 1700.
Did you know? About 330 people lived here in 1829, compared with only a few dozen today.
24 Remains of the 13 Levels
Taiwan · 13.4 km from Keelung25.118° N 121.865° E
Cuthbertwong · CC BY-SA 3.0 The plant belongs to the story of the Jinguashi gold and copper mines in the hills above. Gold was mined here from the 1890s, and in 1904 large deposits of enargite, a copper ore rich in gold and silver, were found. After a Japanese company took over the mines in 1933, it built a new flotation and cyanide processing plant on this hillside, completing it in two phases in 1935 and 1936.
Did you know? The smoke flues are arched concrete tunnels about 2.4 metres wide and 2.6 metres high, with walls 30 centimetres thick.
25 Longteng Broken Bridge
Taiwan · 23.9 km from Miaoli City24.358° N 120.774° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain In April 1935 the Shinchiku–Taichū earthquake struck the region, and it and the aftershocks of that July damaged the bridge beyond repair: the masonry cracked and the ends of the truss were thrown out of line. A new iron bridge was built nearby — 50 metres tall and 200 metres long — and the old one was left to stand as it was.
Did you know? The bricks came from the Taipei area, while stone for the arches was quarried at Zhishanyan in Beitou.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful abandoned place in the world?
- On our list, Houtouwan Village (People's Republic of China) ranks first, followed by Craco (Italy) and Kolmanskop (Namibia).
- Which country has the most abandoned places?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (4), Japan (4) and Greece (2).
- Why was Hashima Island abandoned?
- Hashima, or Gunkanjima, was a coal-mining island off Nagasaki. When the mine closed in 1974 its residents left, and the concrete town has stood empty since.
- Why was Craco abandoned?
- The hilltop town of Craco in Basilicata was evacuated after a landslide in 1963, and further damage in the following years left the old centre deserted.
- How many abandoned places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 25 abandoned places in 16 countries. Italy has the most, with 4.