The Most Beautiful Abandoned Villages in the World
11 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful abandoned villages in the world are Craco (Italy), Kharanaq (Iran) and Villa Epecuén (Argentina). The list covers 11 abandoned villages in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
An abandoned village keeps the shape of a community after the community has gone. Houses still lean on each other along stepped lanes, a church or a tower still marks the centre, and the whole settlement still fits its hillside, cliff or island the way its builders intended. What makes some of them unforgettable is that the form has survived without the life: mud brick turning back to earth, stone towers standing empty against the sky, vines covering every wall.
Kharanaq near Yazd in Iran is a mud-brick village on a valley slope, with a fortress and a minaret above the old lanes. Houtouwan on an island off the coast of Zhejiang is a former fishing village now almost completely wrapped in green creepers. Craco in Basilicata rises on a ridge around its tower and was evacuated after landslides in the 1960s, while Pentedattilo in Calabria clings to a rock shaped like an open hand. Kayaköy in Turkey was emptied in the population exchange of 1923, and Villa Epecuén in Argentina was flooded in 1985 before its ruins emerged again from the salt lake.
Villages are chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with the author named and a place on the map, and the section is also divided into pages by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Craco | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 2 | Kharanaq | Abandoned village | Iran | |
| 3 | Villa Epecuén | Abandoned village | Argentina | |
| 4 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | Turkey | |
| 5 | Khndzoresk | Abandoned village | Armenia | |
| 6 | Pentedattilo | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 7 | Baia | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 8 | Houtouwan Village | Abandoned village | People's Republic of China | |
| 9 | Gamsutl | Abandoned village | Russia | |
| 10 | Anavatos | Abandoned village | Greece | |
| 11 | Vatheia | Abandoned village | Greece |
01 Craco
Italy40.379° N 16.440° E
Maurizio Moro5153 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Craco is a medieval hill town in Basilicata that its people had to leave. Its houses cling to a steep crest about 400 metres high above the valley of the Cavone, around a square Norman tower that dominates the skyline; below and around it spread the calanchi, bare grey badlands carved by erosion. Few places in Italy look so much like a stage set, which is exactly why film directors keep coming back.
Did you know? At its peak in 1561 Craco had about 2,590 inhabitants, compared with roughly 450 recorded in 1277.
02 Kharanaq
Iran32.346° N 54.666° E
مهدی خبره دست · CC BY-SA 4.0 Kharanaq rises out of the desert north of Yazd as a single weathered mass of mud brick: hundreds of rooms, stairways, domes and lanes fused into one hill-shaped settlement, the colour of the earth it was built from. Behind it are bare mountains, in front of it the plain, and below it a green strip of fields and a seasonal river. The old village has been abandoned as its water supply dwindled and its people moved into a new settlement nearby, and the result is one of the most evocative of Iran's mud-brick ghost villages: a place where you can walk through an entire traditional desert community, roofs and walls melting slowly back into the ground.
Did you know? Kharanaq's shaking minaret is one of only three known moving minarets in Iran, and it was also the tallest structure in the village.
03 Villa Epecuén
Argentina · 8.9 km from Carhué37.132° S 62.810° W
Image by azorko from Pixabay Villa Epecuén was a spa town on the shore of a salt lake in the pampas of Buenos Aires Province. Its founder, Arturo Vatteone, opened the first bathing establishment on 23 January 1921, and the town grew quickly around the lake, whose water is almost as salty as the Dead Sea and was promoted for its healing powers. Railways brought visitors from Buenos Aires, and at its height the village had about 1,500 inhabitants, up to 280 hotels, guesthouses and businesses, and some 25,000 visitors each summer.
Did you know? The 1985 flood was triggered by a seiche, a rare standing wave driven by unusual weather, which broke a nearby dam.
04 Kayaköy
Turkey36.577° N 29.087° E
Nikodem Nijaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 Across a green upland valley a few kilometres south of Fethiye, a whole town of roofless stone houses covers the slopes of a hill. This is the old Greek settlement of Levissi, today called Kayaköy, and it is one of the most affecting ruins on the Turkish coast: around five hundred houses, stepped lanes, chapels and a seventeenth-century fountain, all standing where they were left and slowly weathering into the hillside.
Did you know? Under its ancient name Lebessus, the town appears as a Christian bishopric in a church list compiled around 640 under Emperor Heraclius.
05 Khndzoresk
Armenia · 34.5 km from Kapan39.512° N 46.434° E
Vahagn Grigoryan · CC BY-SA 4.0 Old Khndzoresk in southern Armenia is a village carved into the walls of a deep gorge: hundreds of artificial caves cut into the rock pillars and cliffs on the slopes of the Khor Dzor, the "deep gorge". For centuries people lived, kept animals and stored food in these dwellings, linked by paths and stairways that climb from ledge to ledge. Seen from the rim of the canyon, the cave openings pock the rock towers like honeycomb.
Did you know? In 1730 Mkhitar Sparapet was killed by Khndzoresk villagers fearing reprisals; when his head reached the Ottoman pasha in Tabriz, the pasha had the killers beheaded for treachery.
06 Pentedattilo
Italy · 20.7 km from Reggio Calabria37.954° N 15.761° E
Codas · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few abandoned villages have a setting as strange as Pentedattilo's. Its houses cling to the foot of a single massive outcrop on Monte Calvario, in the hills behind the southern tip of Calabria, and the rock above them splits into a row of thick stone towers that look uncannily like the fingers of a giant hand raised against the sky. The name says as much: pente and daktylos, "five fingers" in Greek. Beneath them the village is a tangle of roofless stone houses, stairways and lanes, with the church of Saints Peter and Paul still standing among the ruins and the scant remains of a castle on the slope.
Did you know? The English artist and poet Edward Lear walked through in 1847 and sketched the village; a hiking route now retraces his journey through Greek Calabria.
07 Baia
Italy · 14.9 km from Naples40.817° N 14.070° E
Joseph Meyer · Public domain Two thousand years ago the shore of Baia was the most fashionable stretch of coast in the Roman world. From the first century BC the senatorial elite and then the emperors built seaside villas, terraced gardens and lavish bath halls here, on the inner slope of an old volcanic crater in the Phlegraean Fields west of Naples. Marius, Lucullus and Pompey all spent time on this bay, Julius Caesar owned a villa, Nero built here, and Hadrian died at Baiae in AD 138. Roman writers from Seneca to Propertius treated the resort as a byword for luxury and loose living, which only added to its pull.
Did you know? The Roman town was never a self-governing municipality and was run throughout from nearby Cumae.
08 Houtouwan Village
People's Republic of China30.727° N 122.820° E
Milkomède · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the north shore of Shengshan, one of the outer islands of the Shengsi archipelago where the Yangtze estuary opens into the East China Sea, a whole fishing village has been taken back by plants. Houtouwan climbs a steep cove in terraces of houses, and almost every wall, roof and stairway is now wrapped in a continuous coat of creepers. From the road above, the settlement reads less like a ruin than like a green relief carved into the hillside, with window openings and doorways showing through the leaves as dark squares.
Did you know? The name Houtouwan translates roughly as "Back Bay", a plain description of the cove on Shengshan's northern shore where the village was built.
09 Gamsutl
Russia42.303° N 46.997° E
Slavyanochka · CC BY-SA 4.0 Gamsutl clings to the crest of a steep spur of Mount Gamsutlmeer in the mountains of central Dagestan, a village of grey stone houses stacked one above another up the slope. It lies in the Gunib district, about ten kilometres south-east of the old mountain stronghold of Gunib, high above the valley of the Tsamtichay, at an altitude usually given as between 1,400 and 1,500 metres. Travel writers like to call it the Machu Picchu of the Caucasus, and the comparison is less far-fetched than it sounds: the site is a natural fortress, reachable only along a narrow path, and the houses seem to grow straight out of the rock.
Did you know? At its height the village is said to have held some 3,000 inhabitants in its roughly 300 stone houses.
10 Anavatos
Ανάβατος Χίου
Greece · 10.7 km from Chios38.401° N 26.020° E
RomkeHoekstra · CC BY-SA 4.0 Anavatos clings to the top of a sheer rock about 450 metres high in the hills of central Chios, its grey stone houses so closely packed and so much the colour of the cliff that from a distance the village seems to grow out of it. Two ravines protect it on either side and it can be entered only from the north, which is why it has been called the Mystras of the Aegean. The name itself comes from the Greek for "climbing up", and in the island's dialect it means a place hard to reach.
Did you know? A memorial to the victims of 1822 stands at the entrance to the village.
11 Vatheia
Βάθεια Λακωνίας
Greece36.454° N 22.466° E
KASPAR · CC BY-SA 4.0 Vatheia is the image most people carry away from the deep Mani: a knot of tall, square stone towers crowded onto a rocky hilltop near the southern tip of the Peloponnese, with the sea on one side and bare, stony mountains on the other. It stands on the road from Areopoli to Cape Tainaron, about a kilometre and a half inland from the Messenian Gulf, and from any approach the village looks less like a settlement than a small fortified city, every house its own keep.
Did you know? Vatheia stands at about 180 metres, some 7 km north of Cape Tainaron, the southernmost point of mainland Greece.
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
- Why are villages abandoned?
- Common causes include landslides and earthquakes, flooding, war and forced population movements, and the slow drift of people to cities when farming, fishing or mining no longer support them.
- What is the most beautiful abandoned village in the world?
- On our list, Craco (Italy) ranks first, followed by Kharanaq (Iran) and Villa Epecuén (Argentina).
- Which country has the most abandoned villages?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (3), Greece (2) and Argentina (1).
- Why is Kayaköy empty?
- Kayaköy was home to a Greek Orthodox community that left in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923; the village was never resettled and its stone houses remain on the hillside.
- How many abandoned villages are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 11 abandoned villages in 8 countries. Italy has the most, with 3.