Abandoned places

The Castillo de la Monta atop the 123-metre-high Monte Urgull has watched over the Spanish coastal city of San Sebastián since the 12th century. 

With the publication of the novel ‘Don Quixote’ in the early seventeenth century, Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes wrote one of the classics of world literature. 

The Abbey of Aulne was founded around 637 on the wooded banks of the Sambre. Golden years and disaster succeeded for centuries, but the French Revolution dealt the abbey the final blow.

The French village of Remenauville had 138 inhabitants living and working in the shadow of its neo-Gothic church tower in the early 20th century. But World War I changed everything.

The German army fenced off the border between Belgium and the Netherlands from 1915 with a three-wire fence. Electric current of 2,000 volts was rushed through the middle wire.

In 1815, after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Dutch King William I gave the go-ahead for constructing the New Dutch Waterline. This defence line extended over a distance of 85 kilometres between the Zuiderzee and the Biesbosch.

Spanish engineer and inventor Leonardo Torres Quevedo erected the world's first cable car suitable for passenger transport in 1907.

The Spanish Empire once spread over much of the world, but the Spanish-American War of 1898 dealt the global empire a death blow.

The Hartmannswillerkopf massif in the French Vosges Mountains overlooks the Alsace and was the scene of heavy fighting between the French and German armies from December 1914 onwards during the First World War.

The rock castle of Lutzelhardt was partly carved out of the sandy rocks of the 400-metre-high Adelsberg at some point in the 13th century.