The Most Mystical Abandoned Places in Europe
6 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most mystical abandoned places in Europe are Craco (Italy), Pyramiden (Norway) and Pentedattilo (Italy). The list covers 6 abandoned places in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 3. Last updated 14 October 2026.
An abandoned place turns mystical when its setting does half the work: a village fused to a crag, a town emptied by the ground itself, a settlement left intact in polar silence. In Europe such places carry centuries of history, and the reasons they emptied, from landslides to emigration and closed mines, are part of what you feel walking through them.
Craco in Basilicata, a hill town crowned by a Norman tower, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963 and has since served as a film set. Pentedattilo in Calabria clings beneath a sandstone outcrop shaped like a hand of five fingers, which gave the village its Greek name. Anavatos on Chios, a medieval village of grey stone built on a cliff for defence, was emptied after the massacre of 1822. Vatheia in the Mani is a cluster of stone tower houses built by feuding clans on a ridge above the sea. Pyramiden on Svalbard, a Soviet mining town closed in 1998, still keeps its bust of Lenin facing the glacier.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Craco | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 2 | Pyramiden | Ghost town | Norway | |
| 3 | Pentedattilo | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 4 | Baia | Abandoned village | Italy | |
| 5 | Anavatos | Abandoned village | Greece | |
| 6 | 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 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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 Europe?
- On our list, Craco (Italy) ranks first, followed by Pyramiden (Norway) and Pentedattilo (Italy).
- Which country has the most abandoned places in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (3), Greece (2) and Norway (1).
- Why was Craco abandoned?
- A landslide that began in 1963, worsened by the instability of the clay hill beneath the town, forced the inhabitants to move to a new settlement in the valley below. The old town has stood empty since.
- What is Pyramiden?
- Pyramiden is a coal-mining settlement on Svalbard, founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, which ran it until it was abandoned in 1998. Its buildings, including the northernmost Lenin bust in the world, still stand much as they were left.
- How many abandoned places are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 6 abandoned places in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 3.