The Black Hills Ordnance Depot
The complex contains over five hundred nuclear-hardened concrete military bunkers, partially buried underground and protected by thick berms of earth, to resist a surface blast wave, as well as radioactive fallout.
Tag: one
Dome Homes of Cape Romano
For many years, these bizarre buildings on the isolated southern tip of Marco Island in Cape Romano, Florida, were a bit of a mystery.
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie was the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War.
Suakin Island
The island town of Suakin, in north-eastern Sudan, was an important port for trade and culture on the East African coast for centuries.
El Helicoide: The Shopping Centre That Became A Prison
The spiral structure in Venezuela was conceived in the 1950s as a monument to a nation’s confidence – but now its crumbling shell houses a notorious political prison.
The Abandoned Hotels of Kupari
Kupari was once a hugely popular holiday resort, until it was damaged during the Croatian War of Independence.
Željava Air Base
Situated in the west of Bosnia on the border with Croatia, Objekat 505, as it was officially known, was the largest underground airport in the Balkans. The primary purpose of the Objekat 505 was to house a long-range radar early warning system, akin to NORAD, as well as to provide a strategic command center for the country’s defense.
Erta Ale
Erta Ale (or Ertale or Irta’ale) is a continuously active basaltic shield volcano in the Afar Region of northeastern Ethiopia. It is situated in the Afar Depression, a badland desert area. Erta Ale is the most active volcano in Ethiopia.
Stelling van Amsterdam
The Stelling van Amsterdam was the most advanced military structure of its type in the world – 135 km (84 miles) of forts, batteries and moats completely encircling the city in a defensive barrier.
Abandoned Soviet Camp of Wünsdorf
About 25 miles south of Berlin lies the small town of Wunsdorf, home to about six thousand inhabitants. But less than thirty years ago it had a population of sixty thousand, of which fifty thousand were soldiers of the Red Army. They lived inside one of the biggest military bases in Europe and the biggest…
Vajont Dam
The Vajont Dam (or Vaiont Dam) is a disused dam in Italy, which was completed in 1959. On 9 October 1963, during initial filling, a massive landslide caused a man-made megatsunami in the lake in which 50 million cubic metres of water overtopped the dam in a wave 250 metres (820 ft) high, leading to 1,910 deaths and the complete destruction of several villages and towns.
Presidio Modelo
Presidio Modelo (Model Prison) was a former “model prison” of Panopticon design, located on the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba, built between 1926 and 1931, during the repressive regime of Gerardo Machado.
Michigan Central Station
Since the last train left in 1988, the once-regal station has come to symbolise Detroit’s economic woes and has become a favourite canvas for graffiti artists.
The Soledar Salt Mines
Some 250 million years ago, a part of Ukraine was under a shallow ocean. When the ocean dried up, it left behind a huge deposit of salt.
Mar Sem Fim
Mar Sem Fim (“Endless Sea” in English) is a Brazilian yacht that was shipwrecked, sunk and subsequently got frozen in ice in Maxwell Bay of Ardley Cove, Antarctica.
Ilha da Queimada Grande (Snake Island)
Snake Island is one of the deadliest and most restricted places on earth. The island lies off the coats of Brazil and is home to at least 4000 species of the world’s most venomous snakes alleged to possess the ability of melting human flesh. The island is banned to tourists and is only open to scientists for study and research.
Barbados HARP Gun
The Barbados HARP Gun, was part of Project HARP, short for High Altitude Research Project, which was a joint project of the United States Department of Defense and Canada’s Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles at low cost; whereas most such projects used expensive and failure-prone rockets, HARP used a non-rocket spacelaunch method based on a very large gun to fire the models to high altitudes and speeds.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan
On the cliff face of a sandstone mountain, visible from the ancient Silk Road near the town of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, are two massive voids left by two monumental statues of Buddha that once stood there.
Gulliver’s Travels Park
The park was built next to Mount Fuji near Aokigahara – Japan’s famous ‘suicide forest’ – and close to the former headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo, the religious cult responsible for 13 deaths in the Tokyo sarin nerve gas attack of 1995.
The Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
