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The following is an incomplete list of ghost towns, listed by continent, then by country.
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From 1884 to 1915, Namibia was under the rule of the German Empire and was known as German South West Africa. When diamonds were discovered in 1908, German miners flocked to the area, and several new settlements were established, only to be abandoned once the supply of diamonds dried up. The ghost towns that were left behind include:
The islands of Antarctica, particularly South Georgia, were popular with whalers during the first half of the 20th century, and many of the settlements on these islands are former whaling stations. Most of them were closed down during the Great Depression, when whaling became unprofitable, and are now abandoned. These settlements include:
See List of towns and villages depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war
Many Belarusian villages were abandoned as a result of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.[47] Most lie inside the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve, with approximately 470 abandoned villages in the reserve.[48]
According to the Institute for Research of Population and People at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), Bulgaria has over 500 ghost towns. Rapid rural decay since the fall of communism[51] has seen a sharp decline in village populations, which the BAS says that without intervention, will lead to no more villages in Bulgaria by 2060.[52]
Many villages in the Netherlands were lost to the sea, see List of settlements lost to floods in the Netherlands for the complete list.
Bieszczady National Park is home to several abandoned settlements:
126 localities in Romania are "fictitious".[88] They either have no inhabitants according to the last census, or they are actually in the bottom of an accumulation lake or have completely disappeared from the face of the earth. Some villages have no construction, no access roads, but they continue to remain in the official data bases of the Romanian state.[88] Some of the localities that did not have any inhabitants at the 2011 census are:
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, hundreds of settlements within the exclusion zone were evacuated. Some have remained abandoned ever since, including:
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many people fled and were evacuated from towns and cities throughout Ukraine, including:
Also see List of lost settlements in the United Kingdom
In 1942 and 1943, in preparation for the Allied assault on Normandy, several villages were evacuated to be used as training grounds for the British Army and U.S. forces. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement, but many of the villages remained abandoned, and are used for military training to this day. Some of these villages are listed below; most of them are located within the Stanford Battle Area in Norfolk.
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