Hauntingly beautiful: abandoned places across the world

Abandoned places have a magnetic power of attraction. They have a story - something has happened to these places that led to their desolation.

Pictured: an abandoned house, see-through house, in Alamosa County, Colorado.

From place such as this theme park somewhere in the United States or factories that are no longer used; monuments that no one remembers; old, forgotten villages... Let's take a tour of the eeriest and most beautiful abandoned places from around the world.

(Image: Jakob Owens / Unsplash)

This is the desolate interior of a monument from the Soviet era, when Bulgaria belonged to the socialists. If you think its interior is impressive, its exterior (see next slide) is just as captivating.

(Image: Natalya Letunova / Unsplash)

It appears to be a kind of flying saucer on top of a hill and, despite the futuristic look, it was built back in 1981 to commemorate a congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party. It is now completely abandoned.

(Image: Dimitr Anikin / Unsplash)

Located in California, Bodie was a mining town with a population of 10,000 between 1877 and 1882. But the gold rush came to an end and so did the desire to live here. It became a ghost town.

Bodie is in Mono County and a visit to this ghost town is like a trip back in time. There is a museum now which holds some impressive artefacts, but that's about it. The rest is a village in decay.

(Image: Eniko Polgar / Unsplash)

Of course, if you're doing a tour of the most incredible abandoned places on the planet, you cannot miss the Chernobyl exclusion zone (also called the "dead zone"), a 30-kilometre area around the nuclear power plant where the accident took place in 1986.

(Image: Viktor Kharlashkin / Unsplash)

Here, in the exclusion zone, it is almost as if humanity just simply stopped and only remnants of a past life remain.

(Image: Gerhard Reus / Unsplash)

Marvel at the colours of Băile Govora in the South of Romania - a large abandoned space that has been left to ruin.

(Image: Dorothea Olvani / Unsplash)

An art installation or an abandoned factory? From looking at this photo, the space could be either.

(Image: Lucas Barrère / Unsplash)

A high mountain pass in the Swiss Alps with a sinister hotel that is no longer open for business.

(Image: Nigel Tadyanehondo / Unsplash)

Lisbon's beauty has an air of elegance, but you can on occasion find signs of abandonment such as this one. However, the city is becoming increasingly renovated and improved and, as a result, it's fast becoming a sophisticated centre filled with big-city franchises.

(Image: Rafa Malinowski / Unsplash)

The park is a deserted corner of California, but full of breath-taking beauty. This old abandoned building adds to the mystery of the place, allowing people's imagination to run wild.

(Image: Barthelemy De Mazenod / Unsplash)

This curious image of colours on the façade of an abandoned building in Malaysia makes you wonder what it was used for in the first place, and who came up with the design. All these abandoned places tell their own story.

(Image: Qaz Farid / Unsplash

The photographer went to an abandoned train station in 2016 and managed to enter a train carriage that was there. They beautifully captured this moment of absolute solitude.

(Image: Harishan Kobalasingam / Unsplash)

An abandoned mining village in the town of Alquife in Granada, gives us incredible photos like this one. The image was taken in 2018.

(Image: Quino Al / Unsplash)

Another corner of California where nature and neglect go hand in hand.

(Image: Mick Haupt / Unsplash)

The magic that the light gives in this photo is breath-taking; taken in an abandoned house in Swabia - a cultural and historic region in southwestern Germany.

(Image: Elias Schupmann / Unsplash)

What used to be an important steel fabricating zone in Pennsylvania, the area and its ruins now form a fascinating landscape. These steelworks collapsed thanks to the crisis and finally closed in 2001 due to bankruptcy.

(Image: Joe Dudeck / Unsplash)

The interior of this abandoned industrial building in the same area. During World War I and World War II, the steel forged here supplied the U.S. armed forces. They had also made the steel sections and parts for the Golden Gate Bridge. Now it's ghostly quiet.

(Image: Joe Dudeck / Unsplash)

This abandoned amusement park in San Francisco gets our creativity flowing, imagining what it would have been like in its glory days.

(Image: Joseph Barrientos / Unsplash)

The façade of a closed cinema in the Russian capital. Perhaps in 2020 the world saw a few more of these images.

(Image: Andrey Konstantinov / Unsplash)

A hallway in Fort de la Chartreuse, a 19th-century military building that was abandoned and is now a place for street art and urban exploration.

(Image: Yana Vandeborne / Unsplash)

Traces of an old chewing gum advert on a façade that has been worn away with time.

(Image: Ben Bateson / Unsplash)

Metal and rust are the two main materials in this desolate corner of Scotland, on the banks of the body of water called Loch Long. Everything in this photo - the mountains, the building, the low cloud - comes together to deliver the true feeling of human abandonment in a natural setting.

(Image: Jonny McKenna/ Unsplash)

This is honestly as if the apocalypse had suddenly arrived. The entire space is completely deserted.

(Image: Lingjie Zhang / Unsplash)

A former quarry with empty, ruined buildings where many prisoners were held, starting way back in the 1930s. Despite its tragic history, people go swimming in the lake regardless of it being a dangerous body of water where many people have drowned.

(Image: Kazuki Taira / Unsplash)

Somewhere in Texas. Pulled right out of a horror movie.

(Image: Joshua Gandara / Unsplash)

The poetry and almost mythical photography that abandoned buildings offer.

(Image: Paco S. / Unsplash)

Beautiful light pierces the skeleton of a construction that one can only image was at some point magnificent.

(Image: Cristian Castillo / Unsplash)

Nature has now, quite simply, devoured this abandoned site.

(Image: Jean Wimmerlin / Unsplash)