Henry Ford never saw it, yet he built a Michigan-style town on the Tapajós River to grow his own rubber. The trees failed, the workers rebelled, and the houses are now lived in by the descendants of the people he hired.
A railway worker picked up a stone in the sand in 1908, and within a few years a German-style town of ballrooms, ice and champagne stood in the Namib. The diamonds moved south, the people followed, and the dunes now fill the houses.
Founded by Swedes in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was a showcase mining town on Spitsbergen with more than a thousand residents. Mining ended on 31 March 1998, the people left within months, and the cold has kept the town almost as they left it.
Hashima is a six-hectare rock off Nagasaki that held 5,259 people at its 1959 peak, packed into concrete apartment blocks around an undersea coal mine. Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974 and the island was emptied by April. It is now a World Heritage site, and its wartime forced-labour history is still disputed.
Opened in 1981 on a peak in the Balkan Mountains, the Buzludzha monument was built by public subscription as the House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Its regime fell eight years later. The saucer-shaped hall has been stripped, weathered and, since 2018, closed, while conservators work to save its mosaics.
In the early 1970s Varosha was one of the Mediterranean's busiest beach resorts. In August 1974 its people fled the advancing Turkish army, expecting to return within days, and the quarter was fenced off. It stayed sealed for 46 years, and today only parts are open.
In the forests of western Latvia, a closed Soviet town of thousands grew up around radars that watched for missiles coming from the West. The Russians left in 1998, the unfinished giant radar was blown up in 1995, and the empty town is now a training ground for soldiers.
In 1959 the US Army began cutting tunnels into the Greenland ice sheet and built a nuclear-powered camp for up to 200 people. Publicly it was an Arctic research station. Secretly it was a test for a plan to hide hundreds of missiles under the ice. The moving ice defeated it, and the camp was abandoned, leaving waste buried in the snow.
Deep in a forest in north-west Lithuania, about 10,000 Soviet soldiers built an underground base for four nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. It was one of the first of its kind, was kept secret for years and was abandoned in 1978. Today one of its silos is a museum.
Two launch pads on the Kazakh steppe were built in the 1960s for the N1, the Soviet answer to the Saturn V. The N1 failed on all four flights, and the second one destroyed its own pad. The pads were later rebuilt for Energia and the Buran shuttle, which flew once in 1988.
