The Strangest and Most Tragic Ghost Towns from Around the World

1 Dallol, Ethiopia

This place was a potash, sylvite and salt mining community, abandoned in the late 1960s. Most of the buildings were made of salt blocks.

2Kolmanskop or Kolmanskuppe, Namibia

Kolmanskop was founded in 1908, in the middle of the Namibian diamond fever, but the city with a casino, a hospital and a school was slowly deserted right after the First World War, when the diamond sales dropped.

3Tawergha, Lybia

The town was emptied by the militia of the National Transitional Council of Lybia in October 2011. Tawergha has a population of 24,223 in 2006.

4Pomona, Namibia

Here was the richest diamond mine of the 1910s: according to some stories more than 1 million carats was exploited from the desert here. Now it is in a diamond mining zone (with restricted access) called Sperrgebiet.

5Pyramiden, a Russian settlement and coal mining community, Svalbard, Norway

Since 2007, the owner Trust Arktikugol has been renovating the hotel and guided tours are available.

6Oradour-sur-Glane, France

The village was destroyed in 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, included 205 children and 247 women, were massacred by the Waffen-SS on June 10, 1944. Only a 47-year-old woman named Marguerite Rouffanche survived.

On the orders of Charles de Gaulle, the place was converted to a museum and it stands there as a memento of WWII. Adolf Diekmann, a commander, blamed the slaughter on retaliation for local partisan activity.

7Kayaköy, southwestern Turkey

This village was built on the site of the ancient city of Carmylessus in the mid-18th century. It has an almost only Greek Christian population since 1923, when the village became abandoned after a population change between Greece and Turkey. Since then it's a museum with intact Greek-style houses and two Greek Christian churches.

8Äuli, Switzerland, built by the Swiss government as a military training town

9Copehill Down, Wiltshire, England

It's another mock-up village, but built by the UK Ministry of Defence as a copy of a German village in 1988.

10Döllersheim, Austria

This 900-year old village and several neighboring ones was evacuated shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 to make place for a Wehrmacht military training area. It was the order of Adolf Hitler, even though his own paternal grandmother Maria was buried here. Now it's operated by the Austrian Armed Forces.