The Most Beautiful Abandoned Places in Asia
11 places in 7 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful abandoned places in Asia are Hashima Island (Japan), Kharanaq (Iran) and Kayaköy (Turkey). The list covers 11 abandoned places in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Abandoned places in Asia tell of rapid change. Industrialisation in Japan and Taiwan raised mines, railways and company towns that were left behind just as quickly when coal and copper gave out; mountain villages from the Caucasus to Armenia emptied as people moved to the valleys and cities; and in Iran, mud-brick towns built for a slower way of life were abandoned for new houses nearby. Time, damp and vegetation then turned these places into something between ruin and landscape.
Hashima Island off Nagasaki, known as Battleship Island, was a coal-mining outpost of concrete apartment blocks that closed in 1974. The Sado Mine was one of Japan's richest sources of gold and silver for centuries. Two railway relics complete the Japanese set: the brick arches of the Usui Daisan Bridge, and the Taushubetsu River Bridge, a concrete arch that emerges from and sinks into a reservoir as the water rises and falls. In Taiwan, the Remains of the 13 Levels are the stepped ruins of a copper smelter above the sea, and the Longteng Broken Bridge is a row of brick piers left by an earthquake in 1935.
Houtouwan, a fishing village on a Chinese island, has been swallowed by green vines. In Dagestan, Gamsutl is a stone village on a mountain spur, and Khndzoresk in Armenia is a canyon of cave dwellings crossed by a swinging bridge. Kayaköy in southwestern Turkey is a hillside of roofless stone houses left empty since 1923, and Kharanaq near Yazd is a mud-brick village known for its shaking minaret.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 2 | Kharanaq | Abandoned village | Iran | |
| 3 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | Turkey | |
| 4 | Khndzoresk | Abandoned village | Armenia | |
| 5 | Sado Mine | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 6 | Houtouwan Village | Abandoned village | People's Republic of China | |
| 7 | Gamsutl | Abandoned village | Russia | |
| 8 | Usui Daisan Bridge (Megane Bridge) | Abandoned railway | Japan | |
| 9 | Remains of the 13 Levels | Abandoned mine | Taiwan | |
| 10 | Longteng Broken Bridge | Abandoned railway | Taiwan | |
| 11 | Taushubetsu River Bridge | Abandoned railway | Japan |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
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 are the most beautiful abandoned places in Asia?
- On our list, Hashima Island (Japan) ranks first, followed by Kharanaq (Iran) and Kayaköy (Turkey).
- Which country has the most abandoned places in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (4), Taiwan (2) and Armenia (1).
- Why was Hashima Island abandoned?
- Hashima was a coal-mining island owned by Mitsubishi. When Japan shifted from coal to petroleum, the mine closed in 1974 and its residents left within months, leaving the concrete housing blocks empty.
- Why does the Taushubetsu River Bridge disappear?
- The bridge was left in Lake Nukabira, a reservoir in Hokkaido, after the railway was rerouted. As the water level rises with snowmelt and rain, the arches are submerged, and they reappear when the level drops.
- Why was Kayaköy abandoned?
- Kayaköy, formerly the Greek village of Livisi, was emptied in 1923 during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the houses were never resettled.
- How many abandoned places are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 11 abandoned places in 7 countries. Japan has the most, with 4.