The Most Mystical Abandoned Places in the World
15 places in 12 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical abandoned places in the world are Craco (Italy), Kharanaq (Iran) and Bodie (United States). The list covers 15 abandoned places in 12 countries. Italy has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
An abandoned place becomes mystical when nature and time start to finish the story people left unfinished. Sand drifts through doorways, vines swallow whole streets, a lake rises over a town and then withdraws. Unlike planned ruins, these places were left suddenly or gradually for reasons that are still legible — a landslide, an exhausted mine, the end of an industry — and the emptiness is recent enough to feel personal.
Craco in Basilicata is a medieval hilltop town emptied by landslides in the second half of the 20th century, its silhouette now familiar from film. Pentedattilo in Calabria clings beneath a rock shaped like an open hand. In the Namib Desert, the diamond town of Kolmanskop has filled with sand to the windowsills, and in California, Bodie is a gold-rush town preserved in a state of arrested decay. Pyramiden on Svalbard is a Soviet-era mining settlement left almost exactly as it was, with a bust of Lenin facing the glacier.
Grytviken on South Georgia is a former whaling station whose cemetery holds the grave of Ernest Shackleton. Villa Epecuén in Argentina was drowned by its own lake in 1985 and later reappeared as a grey ghost town. Houtouwan, a fishing village in China's Shengsi Islands, has been overtaken by green vines, while the mud-brick village of Kharanaq in Iran, the cave dwellings of Khndzoresk in Armenia, the stone houses of Kayaköy in Turkey and Gamsutl high in the mountains of Dagestan show how deeply people once shaped their landscape.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Craco | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 2 | Kharanaq | Abandoned village | Iran | |
| 3 | Bodie | Ghost town | United States | |
| 4 | Grytviken | Ghost town | South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands | |
| 5 | Kolmanskop | Ghost town | Namibia | |
| 6 | Pyramiden | Ghost town | Norway | |
| 7 | Villa Epecuén | Abandoned village | Argentina | |
| 8 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | Turkey | |
| 9 | Khndzoresk | Abandoned village | Armenia | |
| 10 | Pentedattilo | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 11 | Baia | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 12 | Houtouwan Village | Abandoned village | People's Republic of China | |
| 13 | Gamsutl | Abandoned village | Russia | |
| 14 | Anavatos | Abandoned village | Greece | |
| 15 | 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? Greek settlers are believed to have lived on the site from around 540 BC.
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.
Did you know? According to local tradition, a small mud-brick shrine called Mashhak marks the spot where Imam Reza prayed on his way to Mashhad.
03 Bodie
United States38.212° N 119.012° W
Image by Jmezes from Pixabay Bodie sits in a bare, wind-scoured basin at about 8,379 feet in California's Mono County, and the first thing that strikes you is how complete it still looks. Roughly 110 wooden buildings stand along the dusty grid of streets, their paint long gone to silver, many of their interiors still holding what was left behind.
Did you know? California has named Bodie its official state gold rush ghost town.
04 Grytviken
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands54.281° S 36.508° W
Lexaxis7 · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of a sheltered cove on the island of South Georgia, the rusting tanks and machinery of an abandoned whaling station spread along the shore, old whale catchers lie beached at the water's edge, and a small Norwegian church stands apart behind them.
Did you know? Solveig Jacobsen, daughter of a station manager, was born here on 8 October 1913 and is recorded as the first child born south of the Antarctic Convergence.
05 Kolmanskop
Namibia · 9.5 km from Lüderitz26.704° S 15.232° E
Image by chrisstenger from Pixabay Zacharias Lewala, a railway worker clearing sand off the tracks near Lüderitz in 1908, pulled a strange stone out of the dust and handed it to his German supervisor, August Stauch. Stauch had no training in gemology, just a hunch worth following up — and the test came back positive.
Did you know? The railways drew power from a 1.5-megawatt station in Lüderitz, then believed to be the largest power plant in Africa.
06 Pyramiden
Norway78.656° N 16.325° E
Bjoertvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of Billefjorden, an Arctic fjord in the heart of Spitsbergen, stands a complete Soviet town that was simply switched off in 1998: brick apartment blocks, a sports hall, a cultural palace, and the northernmost monument to Vladimir Lenin in the world. Pyramiden is a time capsule of the Soviet Arctic, preserved by cold and isolation.
Did you know? The town takes its name from the pyramid-shaped mountain that rises directly behind it; in Russian it is simply Piramida.
07 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.
Did you know? The 1985 flood was triggered by a seiche, a rare standing wave driven by unusual weather, which broke a nearby dam.
08 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.
Did you know? According to local tradition, Muslim settlers arriving from Greece refused to move into the empty houses, believing the town was haunted.
09 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.
Did you know? According to local tradition, the village was founded by two hunter brothers fleeing from Nakhichevan, who followed a deer into the gorge and decided to settle there.
10 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.
Did you know? According to tradition, the settlement began as a colony of the Greek city of Chalcis in 640 BC.
11 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.
Did you know? Ancient tradition named Baiae after Baius, the helmsman of Odysseus, said to be buried on this coast.
12 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.
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.
13 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.
Did you know? At its height the village is said to have held some 3,000 inhabitants in its roughly 300 stone houses.
14 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.
Did you know? A memorial to the victims of 1822 stands at the entrance to the village.
15 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.
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
- What are the most mystical abandoned places in the world?
- On our list, Craco (Italy) ranks first, followed by Kharanaq (Iran) and Bodie (United States).
- Which country has the most abandoned places in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (3), Greece (2) and Argentina (1).
- Why was Craco abandoned?
- A series of landslides, worsened by works on the hillside, made the town unsafe, and the population was moved to a new settlement in the valley from the 1960s. The empty town has since been used as a film location.
- Why is Kolmanskop full of sand?
- Kolmanskop was a diamond-mining town in the Namib Desert that declined after richer deposits were found further south. Once it was deserted, desert winds steadily blew sand into the houses, filling some rooms almost to the ceiling.
- Who is buried at Grytviken?
- The polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton was buried in the whalers' cemetery at Grytviken in 1922, after he died aboard his ship at South Georgia during his final expedition.
- How many abandoned places are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 15 abandoned places in 12 countries. Italy has the most, with 3.