The Most Remarkable Abandoned Mines in the World
5 places in 4 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable abandoned mines in the world are Hashima Island (Japan), Porto Flavia (Italy) and Sado Mine (Japan). The list covers 5 abandoned mines in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
An abandoned mine shows the scale of extraction once the noise has stopped. Open pits descend in terraces like inverted stadiums, coloured by the minerals they exposed; smelters step down hillsides; entire islands were built over to house the people who worked below. Left to weather and water, these places take on a strange stillness, and their geometry — benches, spirals, stacked concrete — becomes as striking as any natural landform.
Hashima Island off Nagasaki, known as Gunkanjima, is a coal-mining island covered with concrete apartment blocks, abandoned after its mine closed in 1974. Corta Atalaya at Riotinto in Andalusia is a vast elliptical open pit whose terraced walls reveal bands of colour. The Remains of the 13 Levels in northern Taiwan are the terraced ruins of a copper smelter on a slope above the sea. Porto Flavia in Sardinia is a mineral loading port built into a sea cliff opposite a rock stack, and the Sado Mine in Japan is marked by a mountain split in two by centuries of gold mining.
The mines on this list are chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hashima Island | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 2 | Porto Flavia | Abandoned mine | Italy | |
| 3 | Sado Mine | Abandoned mine | Japan | ✓ |
| 4 | Corta Atalaya | Abandoned mine | Spain | |
| 5 | Remains of the 13 Levels | Abandoned mine | Taiwan |
01 Hashima Island
Japan · 20.5 km from Nagasaki32.628° N 129.738° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by JordyMeow from Pixabay Hashima, better known as Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, is a scrap of rock about 15 km from the centre of Nagasaki that was turned into one of the most densely populated places ever recorded. Coal was found here in the early 19th century, and from 1890, when Mitsubishi bought the island, it was worked by undersea mines while seawalls and landfill enlarged the ground to 6.3 hectares. Encased in its concrete walls and packed with tower blocks, the island looked from the sea like a warship, and the nickname came from its resemblance to the battleship Tosa.
Did you know? Mine shafts reached up to about a kilometre below the seabed, and one of them linked Hashima underground to neighbouring Nakano Island.
02 Porto Flavia
Italy39.336° N 8.408° E
noname · CC BY 3.0 Halfway up a sheer cliff on Sardinia's west coast, a portal with a small concrete tower looks straight out over the sea at the sea stack of Pan di Zucchero. Behind it, the rock is hollow: Porto Flavia is a harbour built inside a mountain, a pair of tunnels and giant storage silos carved into the cliff so that ore could be poured by gravity straight into the holds of ships waiting below. Finished in 1924, it was an engineering feat with no real equivalent elsewhere.
Did you know? Once Porto Flavia went into service in 1924, the cost of shipping the ore fell by as much as 70 percent, letting Vieille Montagne win a strong market share.
03 Sado Mine
Japan38.042° N 138.256° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0 For much of the 17th century, a mountain on Sado, an island in the Sea of Japan off Niigata, was one of the richest gold and silver sources in the world. The Sado mines were worked from medieval times, but their great era began in 1601, when a vein was found at Aikawa soon after Tokugawa Ieyasu took the island. Under direct control of the shogunate, the Aikawa mine produced an estimated 400 kilograms of gold a year at its early peak, together with large quantities of silver that went into the Tokugawa coinage and was exported to China.
Did you know? A Heian-era tale collection from around the late 11th century tells of a miner from Noto who crossed to Sado and returned with a cloth full of gold sand.
04 Corta Atalaya
Spain37.703° N 6.603° W
Vtornet · CC BY-SA 4.0 Corta Atalaya is a hole in the earth on the scale of a landscape: an elliptical open-pit copper mine about 1,200 metres long, 900 metres wide and 350 metres deep, its walls stepped in concentric terraces of ochre, rust and grey down to a pool of water at the bottom. Worked for most of the 20th century and now silent and partly flooded, it is the most dramatic sight of the Riotinto mining district in the hills of Huelva province in western Andalusia.
Did you know? Corta Atalaya has often been called the largest open-pit mine in Europe, and in its day it ranked among the largest in the world.
05 Remains of the 13 Levels
Taiwan · 13.4 km from Keelung25.118° N 121.865° E
Cuthbertwong · CC BY-SA 3.0 On a steep green hillside above the north-eastern coast of Taiwan, the concrete terraces of an old ore-processing plant step down the slope like the levels of a ruined fortress. Locals call the site the 13 Levels, and its stacked, roofless halls have earned it the nickname "the Potala Palace of the mines". It is one of the most striking pieces of industrial heritage in Taiwan, a landscape of rust, moss and bare concrete facing the sea at Shuinandong.
Did you know? About 1,000 Allied prisoners of war from Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the US were sent to the surrounding gold mines in 1942–45.
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 was Hashima Island abandoned?
- Hashima was a coal-mining island. When Japan shifted from coal to oil and the mine closed in 1974, the residents left and the island was abandoned.
- What is the most remarkable abandoned mine in the world?
- On our list, Hashima Island (Japan) ranks first, followed by Porto Flavia (Italy) and Sado Mine (Japan).
- Which country has the most abandoned mines?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (2), Italy (1) and Spain (1).
- What is Porto Flavia?
- Porto Flavia is a mineral loading port on the south-west coast of Sardinia, built in the 1920s with tunnels and storage silos cut into a sea cliff so that ore could be loaded directly onto ships.
- How many abandoned mines are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 abandoned mines in 4 countries. Japan has the most, with 2.