Ruins, shipwrecks and lost cities are endlessly intriguing. I once went to Kolmanskop in Namibia and found myself wondering quite what it was that was so alluring. At one level it’s just a rather dowdy German town out in the desert, abandoned in 1956. But what’s special there is the sand and the way it has sifted through halls and kitchens and up the stairs. It’s as if a little bit of our history had somehow ground to halt and got left behind.
Fordlandia, built in the heart of Amazonia in 1928, is now quietly crumbling away as the forest returns
The travel writer Oliver Smith has a neat phrase for these places: ‘enclaves of the past’. In his Atlas of Abandoned Places, he offers us 50 wrecks and ruins, all exquisitely photographed and mapped. Ciudad Perdida (Columbia) is the odd one out, having lain empty since the 16th century. The rest were victims of more recent misfortune, be it war, weather, lava, radiation or just plain human folly.
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