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.
On the steppe of eastern Kazakhstan the Soviet Union fired its first atomic bomb in 1949 and went on to test more than 450 nuclear devices over 40 years, in an area chosen because Lavrentiy Beria called it uninhabited. It was closed in 1991, and a 17-year operation was needed to secure the plutonium left behind.
In March 1946 the United States moved the 167 people of Bikini Atoll to another reef so it could test nuclear weapons. Twenty-three devices were fired there by 1958, including the 15-megaton Castle Bravo. The people have not resettled, and the lagoon is now a World Heritage site and a wreck-diving destination for technical divers.
Built on a river island in the 1830s and 1840s, the fortress at Brest hosted the treaty that took Russia out of the First World War, held Polish opposition leaders in the 1930s, and was attacked in the first hour of Operation Barbarossa. Its ruins now stand inside a vast Soviet-era memorial complex.
On a peninsula between three Masurian lakes stands a Baroque palace that was the seat of the Lehndorff family for centuries. It housed Ribbentrop in the war, lost its last owner to the gallows after the 20 July plot, and has been under slow restoration since 2009.
In March 1944, 76 Allied airmen crawled out of a tunnel beneath a German prison camp in Lower Silesia. Three reached home. Fifty were murdered on Hitler's orders. Today the camp site at Żagań is a museum and memorial.
On a farm clifftop above a Normandy beach, a lone villa, a pillbox and a bunker mark the site of the German radar stolen in 1942. The land is private, but a free memorial a short walk away tells the story, and the beach below is where the raiders left.
In the early hours of 10 May 1940, German paratroopers landed gliders on the roof of Belgium's greatest fortress and disabled its guns with hollow-charge explosives. The fort surrendered the next day. Today it is a museum, with a stretch of its tunnels open to visitors.
On the morning of 6 June 1944, 225 U.S. Rangers climbed a 30-metre cliff in Normandy under fire to capture a German gun battery. The guns were not in their casemates. Today the cratered headland is a memorial site, and a restoration project is under way to protect it from erosion.
Inside the Kohnstein hill near Nordhausen, the SS and German industry built the V-2 rocket with concentration camp labour. About 60,000 people passed through the Mittelbau-Dora camps, and at least a third did not survive. Part of the tunnel system can be visited on a guided tour.
On a sandy peninsula of the Baltic, German engineers built the world's first long-range ballistic missile, using forced labour to do it. The RAF bombed the site in 1943, the Soviets took what was left in 1945, and today a museum sits in its old power station.
In 1940 the Soviet Union began a chain of concrete forts along its new western border. A year later the Germans arrived before the line was finished, and many of its bunkers still stand in forests and suburbs from Lithuania to Ukraine.
Hitler spent months in a pine forest near Vinnytsia in 1942 and 1943, the closest he ever lived to the front. The Germans blew it up when they left, and what is left is a swimming pool and concrete rubble.
Prisoners from across Europe poured concrete roofs several metres thick on the banks of the Weser. Two bombs from the Dambusters' squadron went through one of them, and no submarine ever left the building.
For almost twenty years Soviet scientists drilled into the Kola Peninsula and reached 12,262 metres, the deepest point humans have ever reached in the Earth. The rig is a ruin now, and the hole is sealed.
