7 TOP-rated Places for Urban Exploration Tourism

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Year to year quantity of urbex tourists groves up twofold. The urbextour.com team offers you a rating of the most interesting and impressive places for urban exploration tourism in the world.

  1. Ukraine: Chernobyl Zone and Kyiv Underground Urbex Tours
  2. Japan: Fukushima Zone and Hashima Island
  3. Kazakhstan: Baikonur Cosmodrome and Rebirth Island
  4. Romania: Buzludzha – Abandoned Communist Palace
  5. France: Paris Catacombs and Abandoned Metro Stations
  6. Albania: Gajer Airbase, Submarine Base and Polican Plant
  7. Italy: Sommerzano Castle and Sorrento Mill

 

UKRAINE: Chernobyl Zone

Chernobyl is one of the most easily accessible and impressive places for Urban Exploration in the world. The territory around Chernobyl Power Plant was polluted but now radiation level is safe there. Today, abandoned ghost town of Pripyat, military unit of Chernobyl-2 with and abandoned villages attract hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world.

In order to be imbued with this post apocalyptic world without people you should go to explore Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the company of a urbex guide.

Stalkers on the rooftop in Prypiat

climbing duga-3 b illegal tourist

stalker in abandoned chernobyl village

UKRAINE: Exploring Kyiv Undergrounds

Kiev is a capital of Urban Exploration. Hilly terrain served as a repository of an extensive underground tunnel system. Underground rivers and a labyrinth of drainage tunnels passing up to 60 meters deep under Ukraine capital.

Another hidden side of Kyiv is a system of hundreds fallout shelters had been built during the Cold War times. Abundance of places for urban tourism is makes Kiev the capital of Urbex

klov other brick tunnel under kreschatyk

nikolskaya drain tunnel kiev red siluette

nuclear-bunker kiev tour urbextour

 

JAPAN: Fukushima Red Zone

After the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, more than 200,000 people were evacuated from the radioactive contamination zone. People just left all their things and left. Entire cities plunged into the darkness. Until today, in the red zone of alienation around the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant is strictly forbidden, the penalty for illegal penetration in the region of $ 2000 per person. Perimeters are covered by the police and the local squad, thus everything inside the zone remained untouched.

Red three stories about our expedition to this forbidden land. Links under the slider.

abandoned alcohol on the shelves in Fukushima exclusion zone

Abandoned cars in Fukushima red zone

Entrance to abandoned supermarket in Okuma city-center, Fukushima red zone

 

JAPAN: Hashima Island

Just 15 kilometers from the infamous city of Nagasaki there is a real ghost island Hashima. Until 1974, Hashima was the most densely populated place on the planet, and the level of industrial development was at a high level. But then everything stopped and get frozen.

Today, some fishermen agree to take to the island illegally  those who willing to feel the spirit of the ghost island. Thanks to such researchers, you can see Hashima from the inside, with the remnants of past greatness. More than 40 years have passed, but this island still keeps the echoes of an era when Mitsubishi built a real industrial paradise on a lifeless land. It remains nothing but hope that this era will not turn into dust buried on the oceanfloor.

Остров Хасима

Остров Хасима

Остров Хасима

KAZAKHSTAN: Buran Tomb in Baikonur

In Kazakhstan exist two most interesting for urban exploration tourism places. It was the Soviet response to the space shuttle, designed to take the Cold War into space. But after just one flight, it was mothballed. Now, the ruins of what was called the Buran program are left to rust in the steppe of Kazakhstan.
Two shuttles and a rocket lie in disused hangars, not far from the launchpad of that first flight, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. It’s an active spaceport about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, still used today to send and retrieve astronauts from the International Space Station.
The site is not open to the public, but a few adventurers have mustered the courage to sneak in and take a look.

You can read long read story about our adventures in Baikonur in article
Space Jam: Pizdetz in Baikonur

abandoned shuttle buran

abandoned space shuttle buran in kazahstan

KAZAKHSTAN: Kantubek Ghost Town

The name of Vozrozhdeniya island sounds ironically, in case if you know its history. The place where biological weapons tests were conducted, and which has become another ghost town on the map of the CIS, even today doesn’t give hints of an oasis in the middle of the Aral Sea.

Past tests were not in vain. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin closed the territory, but even after 10 years and all the measures that have been taken to disinfect territory, the burial grounds still exude danger. Viruses do not tolerate high temperatures, and the climate of those regions is famous for them, but the concentration of the virus was so huge that the danger did not exhaust itself. Considering the transformation of Renaissance island into the peninsula, viruses can easily migrate to the mainland during the time. It is just another time bomb.

Today, in this region was opened the extraction of various metals, gas and oil. That is, the territory gradually begins to close again from outsiders.

abandoned ships in aralsk-7 harbour

sand in the cabin of the ship

openair gym in kantubek aralsk-7

ROMANIA: Buzludzha – The Last Communist Palace

Communism did not pass unnoticed not only for minds and lives, but also for architecture. Massive buildings with attributes still remind of this period. One of such evidences of the “red” power is the Bulgarian “flying saucer” on the Bulgarian mountain Buzludzha.

Exploring the former house-monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party is one of the most exciting explorations I have ever done.

Памятник коммунизму в Бузлудже

Памятник коммунизму в Бузлудже

Памятник коммунизму в Бузлудже

PARIS: Catacombs and Metro Tunnels

In the ground beneath Paris, hundreds of miles of tunnels run like arteries. Spaces of all kinds lie underneath the streets : canals and reservoirs, prisons, crypts and bank vaults, wine cellars transformed into nightclubs and galleries. None are as creepy as the infamous Catacombs.

At a depth of 20 meters, equivalent to the size of a five-storey building, the catacombs lie deeper than the Metro and sewer systems. These 100 kilometers of old caves, quarries and tunnels are also home to the bones of around 6 million deceased Parisians from the past centuries.

The Paris subway is one of the oldest in the world and unique in its kind. French subwaybuilders, along with English, were the first pioneers, therefore in the intricate system of road development it is possible to see a lot of unusual design and engineering solutions. For more than a century of history, was built a couple of hundred kilometers of tunnels and about 300 stations in a Paris. Some of the stations, eventually, weren’t in demand and were subsequently closed for passengers. Every day the trains go without stopping past these phantom stations, and their only visitors are street artists and Urbex- photographers. You can get to the abandoned stations during the intervals between the trains or during the night bypass, by blending into the workers. So we did with the comrades. For convenience, I divided all the stations into sections.

exploring underground Paris

three lines in paris metro under Opera

ALBANIA: Underground Aircraft, Submarine Bases and Weapon Plant

Albania is beautiful mountainous country located along  shores of Adriatic and Ionian Seas. The beautiful people of this land want to graze goats, make tasty cheese and drink good vine. But bad communists shepherd them into underground and had ordered them to make weapon.

Well, what a joy to sit in a bunker? After Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha died, the huge militarization of the country started to show up. From more than 70 000 easy bunkers to super massive underground aircraft bases, underground submarine base etc. Also we found underground weapon plant. Here is the best albanian urban exploration places for tourism

abandoned underground shelter for aircrafts in albania

blast resustant submarine gate in underground base

aqua blue water inside abandoned albanian submarine base

ITALY: Sorrento and Sammezzano

We were strolling in the crowded pedestrian center of the small Italian town Sorrento. When suddenly in the middle of the street we looked for a small fence, we saw a 30-meter canyon with vertical rocks and overgrowned ruined old buildings. Somewhere deep under the bridge the stream flowed, on which stood water mill – built in 1866. In this picture, which reminded me the illustation from Arthur Conan Doyle’s book “The Lost World”, only the small flying lizards were missing for completeness.

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