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The plan to build 13, housing units here was led by a property developer who aimed to take advantage of the construction boom at the start of this century. Today the population hovers just above 6, Copper mining in the Last Frontier State used to be a big business. That includes the community of Kennecott, a mining camp established in Today the massive red mill remains—protected by the National Park Service as a National Historic Landmark District—but nobody lives here.
All mining here ceased by , at which point it was turned into a national park Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. When the 2 million Greeks living in Turkey were forced to leave that country in , during the Greco-Turkish War, the town whittled away to practically nothing.
Now, all that remains are these stone structures. Built by the Chinese, just 17 miles outside of the capital city of Luanda, this brand-new development was destined to become a city that could comfortably house half a million people. But the developers failed to do their market research as many of the homes, shops and schools remain empty.
The reason is simple: it costs too much for most people in Angola to move here. At one time, this was the capital of the ancient Lihyanites. As recently as 30 years ago, there were 28, people living here.
But the Nagorno-Karabakh War in forced them to flee. Many of the former homes are ruined, thanks to all that gun fighting, and the Agdam Mosque is a mere shell. Some writers discount settlements that were abandoned as a result of a natural or human-made disaster or other causes using the term only to describe settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable; T. Lindsey Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas , defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists".
American author Lambert Florin's defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self". Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, and the shifting of politics or fall of empires.
Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown e. Boomtowns can often decrease in size as fast as they initially grew. Sometimes, all or nearly the entire population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town. The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis.
Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary community to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process.
A gold rush would often bring intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted. In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona , onto a more direct path.
Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls , which closed in after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault , whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in ; and Cassiar , whose asbestos mine operated from to In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place.
This happened to Collingwood, Queensland , in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in , linking it with the rest of Queensland , and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. The Middle East has many ghost towns that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon.
This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation. Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line , and along U. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster moving highways I and I Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals to take on water.
Amboy, California , was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert. River re-routing is another factor, one example being the towns along the Aral Sea. Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. A similar situation occurred in the U. This required NASA to acquire a large approximately square-mile or square-kilometre buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets.
Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia , plus the northern portion of a sixth Pearlington , along with families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility.
Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For example, the five Mississippi communities that had to be abandoned to build SSC still have remnants of those communities within the facility itself. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse.
Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois , that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property, with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.
Construction of dams has produced ghost towns that have been left underwater. Examples include: [ citation needed ]. Some towns become deserted when their populations are massacred. The original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed on 10 June when of its inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company.
A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial. Another example is Aghdam , a city in Azerbaijan. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials.
It is currently almost entirely ruined and uninhabited. Natural and man-made disasters can create ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in , residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri , decided to relocate after two floods in With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 miles or 5 km away.
Craco , a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata , was evacuated after a landslide in In , Centralia, Pennsylvania , was abandoned due to an uncontainable mine fire , which began in and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of Byrnesville, Pennsylvania , which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well.
Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an anticipated natural disaster — for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux, Ontario , was abandoned in after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former town-site into the South Nation River. Following the Chernobyl disaster of , dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl.
Anthony Decoste C-Suite Advisory. CEOs are under a lot of pressure to keep everything moving in a positive direction during times of economic upheaval Brian Wallace C-Suite Advisory.
The internet has been the defining agent of change for this generation. When web services became widely available in the Alden Mills C-Suite Advisory. Fear and failure are two of the biggest obstacles we face in life. They can prevent us from achieving our Officially abandoned in , the remains of Ruby now reside on private land and remains one of the best-preserved western towns in the US. Founded in , Wittenoom was born as a mining town in Western Australia.
The nearby gorge was brimming with blue asbestos, an important raw building material in the early 20th century. By the early s, Wittenoom was the largest town in Pilbara region. Amid growing health concerns, the declining demand for asbestos led to the mine closing in with most of the residents moving away to find other work, according to ABC.
Wittenoom was officially closed in and the Australian government took steps to limit access to the former mining town and removed it from all official maps. Due to the nature of the mining that took place there, asbestos fibers are still found in the topsoil and air around Wittenoom making it dangerous to spend too much time in the town. According to a documentary released in December , just one resident remains.
It isn't often that a tourist destination frequented by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Raquel Welch, and Brigitte Bardot becomes a ghost town. But that's exactly what happened to the Varosha section of Famagusta in Cyprus. Throughout the early s, Varosha was one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, according to BBC.
In , Turkey invaded Cyprus. As the opposing Turkish and Greek armies descended on the area around Varosha, the residents fled for their lives. It has been fenced off, and nobody but military and UN personnel are allowed into the once beautiful tourist destination. There have been numerous attempts to broker a deal that will once again open up Varosha, but nothing has been agreed upon. Now, the high rises and beaches of Varosha that are slowly being retaken by nature from the far side of the military fence.
President Saparmurat Niyazov planned to create a "golden era of Turkmenistan" in with the building of Ashgabat.
He did so by erecting buildings that broke records, like becoming the city with the most marble buildings in the world. In fact, the city has buildings made of the luxury material.
Ashgabat also has the world's largest Ferris wheel. Today, the city is referred to as "the city of the dead" because it appears empty. Probably founded in the 9th or 10th century undoubtedly one of the largest and best known abandoned medieval villages in England which have been deserted for years.
Located in the beautiful hills of the Yorkshire Wolds, it once had two spectacular stately homes and a church. The church is a standing medieval building , but you can still see the grassed-over foundations houses, built by the noble Percy family, as well as those of the peasants' houses around it. The village's population has declined as local residents have left for sheep farming. It was abandoned shortly after Currently, the site is managed by English Heritage and is a major attraction for archaeologists and tourists alike.
For over 60 years, archaeologists have pioneered new techniques here to understand what life was like in the village and why it was eventually deserted. Belchite is a village with a long history, dating back beyond 75 AD. Over the centuries, it was built with beautiful medieval churches and monuments. Belchite found itself on the front lines between Republican and fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War of to and became the site of one of the bloodiest and most important battles of the entire war.
In the Battle of Belchite , houses were destroyed, churches were razed to the ground, and the townspeople were massacred. Belchite was a thriving city, booming economically until the Spanish Civil War broke out in the s, and the place became yet another European ghost town.
The municipality was completely destroyed by an attack by General Francisco Franco's forces in , who did not authorize the reconstruction of the town and the order was to make Belchite an eternal reminder of what would happen to the enemies of the regime.
The remains of rubble, the sad structures of the buildings and the cathedral riddled with bullet holes are a constant reminder of the realities of war. Located in an area called Basilicata, the town of Craco was abandoned in due to a landslide. The city is situated on top of a rocky outcrop above the surrounding hills, with its architecture perfectly integrated into the landscape. With a university, castle, church and squares, Craco was once a monastic centre, a feudal town and a center of education.
Craco has been the setting for many films, including Saving Grace, James Bond , Quantum of Solace and The Passion of the Christ , thanks to its dramatic landscape and unique atmosphere. Craco, which is now turned into a ghost town once provided panoramic views and warnings of potential invaders, perched strategically on top of a meter high cliff overlooking the arid countryside of southern Italy.
The city of Kolmanskop had a brief but prosperous history in the middle of the Namibian desert. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia. In the early s, after learning that its region was rich in the world's most valuable diamonds , many German miners settled there and built an Alemannic-style village.
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