Abandoned Adriatic: Valdanos Montenegro

Come to the beautiful crescent-shaped beaches of Valdanos, nestled in a cove on the southeastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Wake up to a beautiful Montenegrin sunrise peeking over thousand year-old olive tree groves. Play fútbol on the grass fields or try a round of mini-golf. Tennis courts are a stone’s throw away from the ocean. Afterward grab a quick lunch at the waterside café, or take a dip in the pool! The resort has laundry, post office, and a supermarket for your basic needs. Every villa has sweeping views of the sea. For those who prefer to caravan, a full-service campground is also on the premises. Valdanos offers 240 sunny days a year, but for the restless at night the discotheque should whet the appetite. There is one problem… It has been closed for years.

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Abandoned Industrial Icon: Armour Meat Packing Plant

Sometimes Interesting

The Armour & Company meat packing plant in National City, Illinois is a window into a bygone era, a time capsule with late-19th century technology still on display. During its heyday the busy stock yards of East St. Louis were the largest in the world, and known around the U.S. as the “Hog Capital of the Nation.” Advances in technology and labor disputes ultimately drove the meat packers out of National City. The obsolete Armour plant had become expensive to operate and was eventually shut down by the company in 1959. Unused since Armour & Co. left nearly 55 years ago, the 110 year-old structure still sits in East St. Louis today.

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Casualties of Copper: The Berkeley Pit, Montana

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Tales of gold rushes and silver booms are often recounted from a nostalgic perspective, driven by tall tales of adventures into the lawless Wild West. Perhaps less sentimental is the story of copper, a metal with less value but more significance to the growth of infrastructure. Copper was a major component of industrialization and essential for everything from electrifying the world to fortifying nations during war. Few mining operations could match the lifetime output of the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana. For nearly a century, mining in Butte Valley sacrificed the earth to build and defend America. Today the legacy of Anaconda’s enterprise is the Berkeley Pit, a large open pit mine collecting billions of gallons of toxic groundwater.

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Hottest Inhabited Place on Earth: Dallol, Ethiopia

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The Afar Region of Africa, named for the people who call it home, encompasses Djibouti, Eritrea, and the northeast corner of Ethiopia. A notable trait of the Afar Triangle is the Danakil Depression, the lowest point in Africa. The territory is one of the hottest on the planet, and features everything from earthquakes and volcanoes to geysers and salt canyons. It is also home to Dallol, a remote mining camp accessible by camel. The now-abandoned town of Dallol was once a busy site, mining potash, sylvite, and salt during various times throughout its history. When U.S. mining companies were conducting geological surveys in the early 1960s, they recorded the hottest average temperature for an inhabited location on Earth.

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Texas City Disaster: Deadliest Industrial Accident in U.S. History

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Across the bay from Galveston in Texas is Texas City, a busy port with convenient access to Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to shipping, the city plays an important role in the production and refining of petroleum products. As a port with deep water access to the coast, Texas City hosts international shippers hauling everything from electronics to fertilizer.

The town made headlines in 1947 when a fire on a cargo ship reached the explosive payload and detonated. The blast was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in U.S. history, and the disaster would claim the lives of nearly six hundred people.

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Turkmenistan’s Door to Hell

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Turkmenistan is seventy percent desert – the Karakum Desert, to be exact. The nation is divided into five provinces, the second largest being the Ahal Welayat, which occupies the south-central portion of the country. Ahal is almost entirely desert and contains just fourteen percent of the country’s population, but it is also rich in natural resource deposits.

Soviet scientists discovered a cache of oil reserves near the town of Derweze in the Karakum Desert, and drilling quickly commenced. But when a drilling rig collapsed it created a crater, and large amounts of methane were released. When the oilmen attempted to burn off the methane, it started a fire in a “door to hell” that still burns over forty years later.

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Largest Ship Graveyard in the World: Nouadhibou, Mauritania

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Extending from the west coast of Africa is Ras Nouadhibou, a small peninsula shared by Mauritania and Western Sahara. The east side of the peninsula belongs to Mauritania and is home to Nouadhibou, a city of nearly 100,000 residents and the second-largest settlement in the country. The region’s economic capital, Nouadhibou holds less illustrious titles as well: it is also home to the largest ship graveyard in the world. Financial hardships led to authorities turning a blind eye to ship owners who offered bribes to dump used vessels in the harbor. After nearly three decades of this practice, Nouadhibou’s coastline is a unique landscape of over 300 rotting ships.

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Count Bagno’s City of Toys: Consonno, Italy

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When Count Mario Bagno purchased a large amount of land in the remote northern hills of Italy fifty years ago, he envisioned building a Las Vegas-style adult playground with bars, casinos, and dance clubs. The resort town of Consonno, nestled in the hills of Brianza not far from Lecco, was intended to be the premier weekend getaway for the well-heeled of Milan. But delays would force the resort to open before it was completed and Consonno never enjoyed the success Bagno envisioned. The clock struck midnight for his City of Toys when a 1976 landslide destroyed the only road into town. Today, the long-abandoned Città dei Balocchi sits vandalized and forgotten.

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