Ghost towns

The ghost towns the world left behind

26 June 2026 · 5 min read

The ghost towns the world left behind

An abandoned town is not the same as a ruin. People packed what they could carry and left, and never closed the door behind them. Here are five ghost towns around the world that you can actually visit.

An abandoned town is not the same as a ruin. A ruin has fallen slowly, stone by stone. A ghost town was left behind. People packed what they could carry and walked away, and never closed the door behind them.

Sometimes it was the diamonds running out. Sometimes a war, a market that collapsed, a dream that never held. The houses, the squares and the streets remain, empty but not demolished.

Here are five ghost towns around the world that you can actually visit.

In the middle of the Namibian desert there once stood a thriving diamond-mining town with German mansions, a theatre and a hospital. When the diamonds ran out in the 1950s, all of it was abandoned. Today the sand has taken over. Dunes pour in through the doors and fill the rooms halfway up the walls.

In the sixties an eccentric businessman tore down an entire village in Lombardy to build his own Las Vegas, complete with a minaret, a bazaar and a funfair. A landslide in 1976 put an end to the dream. What remains is a surreal ruin of a town that never quite got to live.

During the Spanish Civil War in 1937, the small town of Belchite was destroyed in one of the war's bloodiest battles. Rather than clear the ruins, the regime left them standing as a monument, and a new town was built alongside. The old one stands empty to this day, and visitors describe a heaviness that is hard to shake off.

Humberstone was one of the world's best-preserved saltpeter towns, built for the workers of the Atacama Desert. When the market collapsed in 1960, it was abandoned. Today it is a Unesco World Heritage Site, a whole town preserved in the dry desert air, where the school, the theatre and the square stand silent.

Not far away lies La Noria, another saltpeter town from the eighteen hundreds. The work was hard and life was short for those who pulled the mineral from the desert. When the industry died, the town was left to silence, and today it is one of the most talked-about desert ghost towns in South America.

The strange thing about a ghost town is that it still looks like a town. Everything remains except the people. It is easier to imagine the life that was, precisely because the scenery stands unchanged.

If you want to see where they lie, and which other abandoned places are closer to you, you will find them all on the map.

More stories