Abandoned in 1988, a mining town located on Norway's Spitzberg Island in the heart of the Svalbard - situated between continental Norway and the North Pole is now visited by curious tourists.
The town is called Pyramiden, named after a pyramid-shaped mountain in the background, previously operated as a Russian mining settlement.
"The Svalbard is Norwegian but had a special status enabling other people to live or work there," says tour guide Kristin Jaeger-Wexsahl in an article about the Arctic Soviet-era ghost town in the DailyMail while touring a group of several dozen who sailed from the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, some 50 kilometres.
In 1936, the first settlers came but were evacuated by the British forces when the Second World War began and mining really began in 1956 during the Cold War years.
The icy island is still under Russian control and it was in 2013 when they started to market the deserted mining settlement as a tourist destination.
The emptied town still has all its amenities including a gym, theatre, hotel, and a playground. The bust of Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin is still in-tact and still immaculate-looking.
In an article about Pyramiden published in the Smithsonian, they described it as if it was a newly emptied town with "withering plants sat on windowsills; clean dishes were stacked on the cafeteria shelves; and neatly folded sheets rested on the former residents' beds. The equipment used for coal mining-the town's raison d'être-sat where workers had left it, ready to rev back into action at the push of a button. It was as if several hundred people had abruptly stopped what they were doing and simply walked away"
Today, one of the empty buildings is now a hotel with 24 rooms, an electric generator, coal-fired water system, lots of woodwork, and vodka.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
