These corners of the globe are deserted for various reasons: economics, superstition, bankruptcy, Nazism. Now they stand alone on the sidelines and sadly look at you from the pages of our magazine.
Terlingua, Texas, USA
By 1890, more than two thousand miners lived and worked here. And then the mines began to flood, and after World War II the price of metal also fell. The latter finished off the town. Today it is inhabited by a wasteland.
Bodie, California, USA
In the terribly distant 1859, gold was found here → the gold rush began. By 1880, the modest population of the town had grown to an immodest 10-odd thousand residents. And then came the Second World War, which also dealt a fatal blow to the city. In 1942, the last mine in Bodie closed. And in 1962, the area was included in one of California’s state parks, making it a symbol of the Wild West.
There is a rumor: if you try to take away a found gold bar from there, you may run into not only evil cops, but also the curse of the local deities.
Johnsonville, Connecticut, USA
This is a small village that was built by industrialist Raymond Schmitt. He traveled all over New England and bought Victorian houses, and then brought them to Johnsonville. I wanted to make my own tourist Disneyland. But it burned out. Empty houses still stand there.
Source: Imgur
Centralia, Pennsylvania, USA
Real Silent Hill. The city of Centralia was built in 1866. They brought the miners there, and let them pay them generously for the extraction of coal, which is a dime a dozen there. For almost a hundred years, things were going just fine, and then in 1962 there was a fire → coal caught fire → the disaster engulfed all underground deposits. Bottom line: Centralia is still slowly but surely burning. And according to scientists, it will continue like this for another 250 years.
Find out more interesting things about the burning American “Silent Hill” in the following video:
Goldfield, Arizona, USA
Another American symbol of the Wild West, in which gold was first mined and then abandoned. Located on the Apache Trail, it has been empty for a century.
Source: Imgur
Oradour-sur-Glane, France
On June 10, 1944, an SS company tried to wipe this village off the face of the earth. It didn’t work, which we can’t say about the unfortunate 642 residents of the village (including women and children). Today, Oradour-sur-Glane is part of the Haute-Vienne department. New residential areas have been built around it, but the ruins are still untouched. The French cherish this place as a monument to the victims of one of the most massacres in the history of their state.
Rhyolite, Nevada, USA
It was founded in 1905 near Las Vegas. A similar “miner’s” story: they found a mine, brought in thousands of workers. Six years later, the source became impoverished → the city was deserted → in 1920 there was no one left there anymore. Today, Hollywood directors periodically drop by there with cameras, cameramen, actors and the desire to shoot another box office blockbuster.
Consonno, Italy
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New cities are built from scratch every year around the world. However, they do not always find their inhabitants. Hundreds of new residential buildings stand empty, eternally waiting for their owners. There are such newborn ghost towns in various parts of the planet.
We are in website wondered why this was happening. Take a look what we found out. And we have prepared the most interesting things for you at the end of the article.
1. Kangbashi, China
China ranks first in the world in the number of buildings under construction. New cities are built in China every year, but despite the high population density, many of these cities remain empty.
One of the suspected reasons is extremely high property prices. Another version talks about insurance in case of war. If Chinese densely populated cities are attacked from the air, it will be very expensive to restore them. It is much more profitable and easier to resettle the surviving population in new cities.
China's largest ghost town is in Ordos County, where a rich coal deposit was discovered. Thousands of residential buildings have been built in the city of Kangbashi, as well as all the necessary infrastructure, including an airport, parks, theaters, street sculptures and a museum.
The city was built in 2001 and was designed for 1 million inhabitants. However, now only 2% of the planned population lives in it.
2. Siruenia, Spain
Siruenia was still a small village in northern Spain in the early 2000s. But a few years later, on its outskirts, an entire city was erected in record time, designed for 10 thousand people.
Nowadays, just over a hundred people live in Siruenia, but all the necessary infrastructure is functioning properly.
3. Tianducheng, China
In the east of China there is a small copy of Paris - the city of Tianducheng. The city was built in the same style, it has its own Champs Elysees and cathedral Notre Dame of Paris and even a smaller copy of the Eiffel Tower, whose height is 108 meters.
The city was built in 2007 and is designed for 100 thousand residents who want to change their rural lifestyle to an urban one.
However, at this stage, “eastern Paris” is not even a quarter populated. Real estate prices turned out to be prohibitive, as in other similar places in the Middle Kingdom.
Now Tianducheng is more reminiscent of large-scale French scenery and therefore is loved by newlyweds for wedding photo sessions.
4. Kilamba, Angola
The new city of Kilamba was built by a Chinese investment corporation 30 km from Luanda, the capital of Angola. And he was the embodiment of the election promises of the country's President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who guaranteed the construction of a huge amount of housing in the shortest possible time.
Construction of Kilamba was completed in 2012. In the city, 750 multi-storey residential buildings were erected, designed for 0.5 million people, more than 100 retail premises and dozens of schools.
The total construction cost is estimated at $3.5 billion.
However, despite all efforts, the population of the city is about 1,000 people. It turned out that there is practically no middle class in the country. The majority of the population lives below the poverty line, subsisting on $2 a day. And therefore she cannot afford to buy an apartment even with the help of a mortgage.
5. Thames Town, China
Another Chinese ghost town, Thames Town, is a smaller copy of London. Occupies an area of only 1 square. km and is designed for 10 thousand inhabitants.
The settlement of the pseudo-European town was prevented by the economic crisis of 2008, which showed that the layer of wealthy Chinese for whom the city was designed is practically absent. Very few people could afford housing in “Chinese London”, so the city still remains a ghost.
Now Thames Town, like Tianducheng, is just a giant wedding backdrop.
6. Masdar, UAE
Masdar eco-city is being built 17 km from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Nations United Arab Emirates. The project is estimated at $22 billion. The project is based on the principle of responsibility, which means a sustainable ecological environment in the city. This will be achieved by providing energy from renewable sources, minimizing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and a system for completely recycling urban waste.
The city is designed for 50 thousand inhabitants, but now only 300 people have settled there, including mainly students from the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.
Despite the fact that the project is almost completed, the city is still empty. One of the reasons that prevented settlement was the economic crisis. In addition, a population accustomed to living in luxury may not be ready to live by the principle of responsibility that lies at the heart of Masdar.
7. Kijeongdong, North Korea
The North Korean village of Kijeongdong is located near the demilitarized zone and is the only populated area visible from South Korea. The village was built in the 1950s for the purpose of propaganda high level life that awaits all southerners who cross the border.
Despite official version that 200 ordinary families live in the village, with the help of modern optics you can see that the houses are empty boxes without interior spaces. The lights in the village come on in the same parts of the buildings, always at the same time. Sometimes soldiers can be seen in the village, as well as cleaning windows women, the same ones for 15 years.
Until 2004, the village had loudspeakers with propaganda texts directed towards the south. Realizing the uselessness of such broadcasts, the North Koreans began broadcasting military marches at full volume for 20 hours a day. Then South Korea launched a response in the form of blaring speakers with South Korean rock music. When the noise became unbearable, the radios on both sides were turned off permanently.
Initially, members of the government lived here. According to rumors, they were ordered to move to the new capital within 48 hours, but few complied with the will of the authorities. And that's why for a long time Naypyitaw was a deserted place with empty houses and streets. However, now, a dozen years later, it is a vibrant city with an ever-growing population.
Which city surprised you the most? Perhaps you know of other new ghost towns? Share in the comments!
The mystery of Chinese ghost towns April 16th, 2012
You've probably all heard about ghost towns in China. These are the pictures that are circulating all over the Internet.
Why does China build large, well-designed ghost cities that sit completely empty?
Photos from Google Earth of city after city show huge complexes consisting of office skyscrapers, government buildings, residential buildings, residential towers and houses, all connected by a network of empty roads, and some of the cities are located in some of the most inhospitable places in China.
Images of these ghost towns (after countless billions of dollars spent on design and construction) show that no one lives in them.
The photos look like a giant film set, prepared for the filming of some apocalyptic film, in which neutron impact or unknown disaster destroyed people, leaving skyscrapers, sports stadiums, parks and roads completely untouched. One of these cities was actually built in the middle of the desert, in inner Monogolia."
Business Insider published a series of photos of these Chinese ghost towns. None of them show cars, with the exception of about 100 parked in a large vacant lot near the government building, and another one, which depicts a beautiful park, and people added in a photo editor.
According to some estimates, there are now about 64 million empty houses in China. China is building up to 20 new ghost towns a year in its “vast areas of free land.”
Everything would be fine, but then I came across some kind of crazy explanation for this circumstance. Listen here!
IN this moment There are about 100 million-plus cities in China. And these newly built ghost towns are a reserve fund for the population. In case of war. There is no point in bombing them; there are many more important targets. And existing residential cities will definitely be struck, and most likely nuclear. It is expensive to restore them during the war, and such gigantic masses of people cannot be shoved through the cracks. It is much more profitable and easier to rebuild entire cities with ready-made infrastructure in advance, and at the right time to evacuate the remaining population and surviving equipment from factories and factories.
But there is one very unpleasant moment here. Keep in order
Let's still read the real version.
Dai District, Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, covers an area of more than 20 square meters. km. Over the course of several years, it has been actively developed and has a fully formed infrastructure. However, for several years now about 70% of the living space there has been empty, which has turned it into a real “ghost town.”
According to the Chinese newspaper Daily Economic Bulletin, the new Dai district is located 70 km from the Shenzhen metropolis; literally in a matter of years it was completely built up with both residential, administrative and business buildings. However, on the wide streets between high-rise buildings it is very rare to see passers-by.
Since real estate prices in this area are 4-5 times lower than in neighboring Shenzhen, residents of the metropolis bought apartments here. But they did this solely as an investment, hoping that over time the prices for this property would rise. They themselves do not live there, they only visit occasionally.
Their assumptions turned out to be correct; over the past few years, property prices in the area have more than doubled. Average square meter now costs 5,000 yuan ($714).
The new city is like an area after an epidemic in which a small part of the population has survived. You can rarely see light in the windows of high-rise buildings.
“All the apartments here have been sold a long time ago, but most of the owners do not live in them. Less than 20% of the residents live here permanently,” says a security guard at one of the neighborhoods.
Local residents joke: “Nothing grows here except empty houses.”
Forensic Asia Limited in its report points out the existence of numerous empty areas in China, the so-called “ghost towns”.
The Zhengdong New Area of Shenzhou, Henan Province has been named the largest "ghost town" and a landmark area of the real estate bubble in China. The area began to be built in 2003, it covers an area of 150 square meters. km. For several years now it has been less than 40% occupied.
After this information was widely publicized in the media, a local official completely rejected it in an interview with the Chinese Business newspaper. In turn, he stated that the current occupancy rate of new buildings is 90%, and the number of residents of the Zhengdong region has already exceeded 300 thousand people.
However, according to the same authorities, more than 30% of the planned development of the area has already been built, and the population level given by the official is only 7.5% of the planned number of residents, which by 2020, according to the project, should be 4 million people .
Last year, Chinese media reported that the State Grid Company of China conducted a study in 660 cities. As a result, it was discovered that the electric meters of 65.4 million apartments had zero readings for six months. This suggests that no one lives in the apartments. These apartments are enough to accommodate 200 million people.
Chinese economist Xie Guozhong believes that 25% - 30% of new buildings in China remain empty. According to him, the area of residential premises in Chinese cities is 17 billion sq. m, which is enough to accommodate all the residents of China.
When the financial crisis began, many Chinese businessmen began to transfer their capital from production to real estate in order to somehow avoid bankruptcy. Thus, many houses and apartments in the country were bought just for the sake of investing money. But it also became main reason a sharp increase in real estate prices, which the authorities still cannot bring under control.
The fact is that for some time, due to the construction boom and the global economic crisis that reduced the appetites and opportunities of developers, a hitherto unprecedented type of ghost towns arose in China. This is a comfortable residential property, with all the necessary to modern man infrastructure in which no one lives. And if we don’t settle in it, everything will be overgrown with weeds, like in Pripyat.
The construction boom has poured trillions of yuan into new empty cities designed for 64 million inhabitants. Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus can be resettled into these 20 clean (for now) kingdoms of new buildings. And in our place - the Chinese, let them clean up what we haven’t finished.
An elderly man pushes a cart as he crosses the road separating completed buildings from those still under construction.
Construction in progress. Workers are chopping the walls of a future shopping center for non-existent residents of an apartment complex.
Monument. A pedestrian walks down the street behind a giant sculpture depicting two horses in Lingyuinli Square, Kangbashi district.
Why are they empty? Firstly, most of these apocalyptic ghost towns are built far from busy trade routes and large enterprises, far from civilization, in places almost undeveloped by man. Secondly, the price of real estate has jumped up and now it is such that the average Chinese, who cannot “raise” his credit, will not buy apartments God knows where. It’s cheaper and more fun to live in Shanghai, “in a cage.”
Cities become ghosts not only when all their inhabitants leave them. Sometimes no one comes to new cities. The authorities of countries with fast-growing economies approve megalomaniac projects for the construction of new cities and regions, but very often they miscalculate. In the jungles, steppes and deserts of Asia and Africa, cities are growing, doomed to turn into ruins.
The leader in the construction of ghost towns is China. Due to the construction boom, the country was filled with empty residential areas and useless airports. But the rest of the developing world is not far behind, and the entire eastern hemisphere is filled with grim monuments to globalization and economic growth.
Ordos, China
China's largest ghost town, Ordos, is located among the steppes of Inner Mongolia province. In the 1990s, vast coal reserves were discovered in the region, and local residents quickly became rich by selling their lands to large companies. An economic boom began in the province, the symbol of which was to be the huge city of Ordos. But the project was overestimated. The city has its own airport, mosque and contemporary art center, but this does not attract new residents. In a settlement designed for several hundred thousand people, only 2% of the area was inhabited. Optimists are buying apartments in Ordos as an investment, although many experts predict an imminent collapse of the Chinese real estate market; While some areas of Ordos continue to be built up, others are turning into ruins.
Thames Town, China
Not far from Shanghai there are ruins of an English city. In 2006, in the Songjian district of Shanghai, the construction of Thames Town, a village stylized as a small English city. It has red brick houses, a Gothic church and red telephone boxes, but no inhabitants. They invested about 800 million US dollars into the creation of the city and in the end they did not get what they wanted. The middle class that Thames Town was designed for uses it not as a place to live, but as a backdrop for wedding photographs. The city's streets and squares are constantly filled with newlyweds posing for photos in front of faux Victorian architecture and kitschy sculptures like a bronze James Bond.
King Abdullah Financial District, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Move to a new financial center Saudi Arabia no one. Authorities Arab state announced plans to create a business district in Riyadh in 2006. It consists of 42 buildings with a total office area of 900 thousand square meters. However, six months before the opening of the first office centers, only 10% of the premises were able to be rented out. The Saudis have built too much: the new area has three times more office space than all of Riyadh. Even if all the city's businesses moved to new buildings, the area could not be filled even halfway. In addition, it is very expensive there: large Saudi banks even decided that it would be more profitable for them to build their own skyscrapers in other areas. There is no hope for foreigners either. Unlike Dubai, Riyadh's banks mainly work with local companies.
Masdar, United Arab Emirates
The “green” city of Masdar in the UAE has not yet been completed, but the media are already talking about problems with settlement. So far, only students from the new Institute of Science and Technology have arrived in the city, which provides itself with energy thanks to almost 90 thousand solar panels. In Masdar you can't drive a car and there are almost no shops, so you have to travel to other cities to buy many goods. The principle of luxury that Abu Dhabi and Dubai live by has been replaced by responsibility, and apparently the locals don’t like it. The UAE authorities plan that in 15 years the city's population will increase to 100 thousand people. But Masdar stands empty, even though the project is almost completed.
Nova Cidade
de Quilamba, Angola
Naypyitaw, Myanmar
The new capital of Myanmar, Naypyitaw, was founded in 2005. The military junta that rules the country decided to move the capital from Yangon completely unexpectedly for the whole world. Among the versions: the military’s fear of large crowds of people and possible protests in the former capital and the instructions of astrologers, to which the Burmese actively listen. Several years of construction and billions of dollars have resulted in a city with luxurious government buildings, eight-lane highways, golf courses, shopping centers and a zoo. According to rumors, civil servants were ordered to move to the city no later than 48 hours after its opening, but few followed the advice. For several years, the city, designed for several million people, stood half empty: there was no point in the poor Burmese leaving their hometowns; and only in last years Thanks to the democratization of the political regime and the opening of borders, the population poured into the new capital. Now more than a million people live in Naypyitaw, and it is one of the ten fastest growing cities on the planet.
Why does China build large, well-designed ghost cities that sit completely empty?
Photos from Google Earth of city after city show huge complexes consisting of office skyscrapers, government buildings, residential buildings, residential towers and houses, all connected by a network of empty roads, and some of the cities are located in some of the most inhospitable places in China.
Images of these ghost towns (after countless billions of dollars spent on design and construction) show that no one lives in them.
The photos look like a giant film set, set up for the filming of some apocalyptic film in which a neutron strike or unknown natural disaster has wiped out people, leaving skyscrapers, sports stadiums, parks and roads completely untouched. One of these cities was actually built in the middle of the desert, in inner Monogolia."
Business Insider published a series of photos of these Chinese ghost towns. None of them show cars, with the exception of about 100 parked in a large vacant lot near the government building, and another one, which depicts a beautiful park, and people added in a photo editor.
According to some estimates, there are now about 64 million empty houses in China. China is building up to 20 new ghost towns a year in its “vast areas of free land.”
Everything would be fine, but then I came across some kind of crazy explanation for this circumstance. Listen here!
At the moment, there are about 100 million-plus cities in China. And these newly built ghost towns are a reserve fund for the population. In case of war. There is no point in bombing them; there are many more important targets. And existing residential cities will definitely be struck, and most likely nuclear. It is expensive to restore them during the war, and such gigantic masses of people cannot be shoved through the cracks. It is much more profitable and easier to rebuild entire cities with ready-made infrastructure in advance, and at the right time to evacuate the remaining population and surviving equipment from factories and factories.
But there is one very unpleasant moment here. Keep in order.
Let's still read the real version.
Dai District, Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, covers an area of more than 20 square meters. km. Over the course of several years, it has been actively developed and has a fully formed infrastructure. However, for several years now about 70% of the living space there has been empty, which has turned it into a real “ghost town.”
According to the Chinese newspaper Daily Economic Bulletin, the new Dai district is located 70 km from the Shenzhen metropolis; literally in a matter of years it was completely built up with both residential, administrative and business buildings. However, on the wide streets between high-rise buildings it is very rare to see passers-by.
Since real estate prices in this area are 4-5 times lower than in neighboring Shenzhen, residents of the metropolis bought apartments here. But they did this solely as an investment, hoping that over time the prices for this property would rise. They themselves do not live there, they only visit occasionally.
Their assumptions turned out to be correct; over the past few years, property prices in the area have more than doubled. On average, a square meter now costs 5,000 yuan ($714).
The new city is like an area after an epidemic in which a small part of the population has survived. You can rarely see light in the windows of high-rise buildings.
“All the apartments here have been sold a long time ago, but most of the owners do not live in them. Less than 20% of the residents live here permanently,” says a security guard at one of the neighborhoods.
Local residents joke: “Nothing grows here except empty houses.”
Forensic Asia Limited in its report points out the existence of numerous empty areas in China, the so-called “ghost towns”.
The Zhengdong New Area of Shenzhou, Henan Province has been named the largest "ghost town" and a landmark area of the real estate bubble in China. The area began to be built in 2003, it covers an area of 150 square meters. km. For several years now it has been less than 40% occupied.
After this information was widely publicized in the media, a local official completely rejected it in an interview with the Chinese Business newspaper. In turn, he stated that the current occupancy rate of new buildings is 90%, and the number of residents of the Zhengdong region has already exceeded 300 thousand people.
However, according to the same authorities, more than 30% of the planned development of the area has already been built, and the population level given by the official is only 7.5% of the planned number of residents, which by 2020, according to the project, should be 4 million people .
Last year, Chinese media reported that the State Grid Company of China conducted a study in 660 cities. As a result, it was discovered that the electric meters of 65.4 million apartments had zero readings for six months. This suggests that no one lives in the apartments. These apartments are enough to accommodate 200 million people.
Chinese economist Xie Guozhong believes that 25% - 30% of new buildings in China remain empty. According to him, the area of residential premises in Chinese cities is 17 billion square meters. m, which is enough to accommodate all the residents of China.
When the financial crisis began, many Chinese businessmen began to transfer their capital from production to real estate in order to somehow avoid bankruptcy. Thus, many houses and apartments in the country were bought just for the sake of investing money. But this was also the main reason for the sharp increase in real estate prices, which the authorities still cannot bring under control.
The fact is that for some time, due to the construction boom and the global economic crisis that reduced the appetites and opportunities of developers, a hitherto unprecedented type of ghost towns arose in China. This is a comfortable residential property, with all the infrastructure necessary for a modern person, in which no one lives. And if we don’t settle in it, everything will be overgrown with weeds, like in Pripyat.
