Ghost towns and houses

This summer, a 113-year-old wooden church was moved to a new location in the Swedish town of Kiruna, and that has everything to do with the iron and steel that surround us.

Tucked away in the northern French town of Croix stands a bold statement in brick, steel, and marble: Villa Cavrois. This striking modernist mansion, completed in 1932, was the brainchild of famed architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

The unfinished concrete carcass of a ghost hotel has been receiving its first visitors since early 2025 after more than half a century of vacancy and decay.

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 thousand inhabitants of the French village of Ornes, on the edge of a forest in the early 20th century, were awoken from their idyllic lives at the outbreak of the First World War.

When Vesuvius erupted on 24 October 79, the Roman provincial capital of Pompeii disappeared under a thick layer of ash. 

When new roads were mapped out in Iceland in the late 1940s, it made for much better accessibility to Krýsuvík, a region full of geothermal fields and a dreamed agricultural area with vast fields where sheep had been herded for centuries.

In the westernmost corner of Iceland's Snæfellsnes peninsula, at the foot of the Snæfellsjökull volcano, lies the concrete skeleton of the abandoned farm Dagverðará.

In the 1960s, the inhabitants of the Spanish town of Jánovas were forced to leave their houses in order to build a reservoir and dam which were never actually built.

The polder village of Doel is located on the left bank of the river Scheldt and is surrounded by the Doel nuclear power plant and the Deurganck container dock that was put into use in 2005.