Abandoned Places to Visit: 7 Eerie Sites Around the World

The best abandoned places to visit aren't ruins in the ancient sense - they're places people walked away from within living memory, leaving the kettles, the school desks and the cinema seats exactly where they were. There's a particular kind of travel thrill in standing somewhere that was busy fifty years ago and is silent now. These seven sites span five continents, from an Arctic mining town to a village swallowed by the Namib Desert, and every one of them is legally visitable with the right guide or ticket. Here's where to go, what to see, and the best time to visit each.

Hashima Island, Japan: The Concrete Battleship

Nine miles off Nagasaki sits Hashima - better known as Gunkanjima, or "Battleship Island," for its brutal silhouette on the horizon. Mitsubishi packed over 5,000 coal miners and their families onto this 16-acre rock, making it the most densely populated place on Earth in 1959, then closed the mine in 1974 and everyone left within weeks. Today the concrete apartment blocks are collapsing into the sea, and you can only visit on a licensed boat tour from Nagasaki Port, which lands you on a fixed walkway for about an hour. Tours are frequently cancelled in rough seas, so build in a spare day - and go between April and October for the best odds of landing. Pair it with the Gunkanjima Digital Museum in Nagasaki, where drone footage shows you the parts of the island no visitor is allowed to enter.

Kolmanskop, Namibia: A Ghost Town Buried in Sand

Kolmanskop boomed in 1908 when a railway worker picked a diamond out of the sand, and for two decades it was the richest town in southern Africa - complete with a ballroom, a bowling alley, an ice factory and the first X-ray machine in the hemisphere. When bigger diamond fields opened further south in the 1950s, everyone left, and the Namib Desert simply moved in. Now the dunes pour through doorways and pile waist-deep in what were once grand pastel-painted parlours, which is why this is one of the most photographed hidden gems in Africa. Buy your permit at the gate near Lüderitz, and if you're serious about photos, get the sunrise permit - the low light through the peeling walls is the whole reason to come. Best time to visit is May to September, when the coastal heat is manageable.

Bodie, California: The American West Frozen Mid-Sentence

Bodie is the purest ghost town in the United States, and the reason is a policy called "arrested decay" - the California State Parks service stabilises the roughly 110 surviving buildings but repairs nothing cosmetic. Peer through the windows and you'll see stocked general-store shelves, pool tables, coffins and school books left exactly as the last residents abandoned them in the 1940s. At its 1880 peak this was a genuinely lawless gold-rush town of 8,000 people, 65 saloons and a daily murder rate that made national news. It sits at 8,375 feet in the Sierra Nevada east of Yosemite, and the last three miles are unpaved - the road often closes with snow from November, so plan for late June through September.

Craco, Italy: The Hilltop Village That Slid Away

Craco is a medieval village in Basilicata that clings to a clay ridge above the Cavone valley, and it looks so cinematic that it's stood in for biblical Jerusalem in The Passion of the Christ and appeared in Quantum of Solace. Landslides and a 1963 sewer-line failure destabilised the ridge, and by 1980 an earthquake finished the job - the last residents moved down the hill to Craco Peschiera. You can't wander freely, but hard-hat guided tours run daily through the medieval streets, the Norman tower and the crumbling Church of San Nicola. Come in spring or autumn: Basilicata bakes in July and August, and the evening tours in summer, lit by floodlights, are the ones to book.

Oradour-sur-Glane, France: A Village Left as Evidence

This is the most sobering entry on any abandoned places bucket list. On 10 June 1944, an SS division massacred 643 residents of this Limousin village and burned it to the ground; Charles de Gaulle later decreed that the ruins would never be rebuilt, standing instead as a permanent memorial. You walk down the main street past burnt-out shells, rusted sewing machines, the tram rails and a car still parked where its owner left it. Entry to the village is free and you enter through the excellent Centre de la Mémoire museum, which gives you the context you need before you go in. Allow two hours, and know that this is a place for quiet - it's a memorial, not a photo opportunity.

Pyramiden, Svalbard: A Soviet Town in the Arctic

At 79° north, Pyramiden is a Soviet coal-mining settlement that Russia abandoned almost overnight in 1998, and the Arctic cold has preserved it almost perfectly. The world's northernmost Lenin bust still stares down the main square, the swimming pool tiles are intact, and sheet music sits on the grand piano in the culture house. You reach it by boat from Longyearbyen in summer or by snowmobile in spring, always with an armed guide - this is polar bear country, and that rule isn't negotiable. There's even a functioning hotel, the Tulpan, if you want to spend a night in a ghost town where the sun never sets. Visit between June and August for boat access, or March to May for the snowmobile crossing.

Humberstone and Santa Laura, Chile: Nitrate Ghosts of the Atacama

In the driest desert on Earth, these two UNESCO-listed saltpetre works once processed the nitrate fertiliser that fed Europe's farms - until synthetic ammonia made the whole industry obsolete and the towns emptied in 1960. Because it essentially never rains here, Humberstone still has its theatre with seats, its cast-iron swimming pool made from a shipwrecked hull, and rows of workers' houses with wallpaper on the walls. It's about a 45-minute drive inland from Iquique, and most visitors combine it with the Pintados geoglyphs nearby. Go late in the afternoon - the light across the pampa is extraordinary, and the temperature drops to something civilised.

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