Rough Guides' Top Five Ghost Towns

Rough Guides' writers have been travelling the globe for over 25 years, uncovering some unique and amazing places along the way. This is our pick of villages, towns and cities that owe much of their fascination to their sheer emptiness. Ghost Towns – Top Five abandoned habitations 1. Ghadames, Libya The houses in Ghadames, a pastel-coloured town in the Sahara Desert, are as dense as honeycomb – it’s possible for the women to travel about town by walking on the rooftops (keeping separate from the men) – and its covered alleyways are like an underground maze. One can imagine the inhabitants milling about in dark corners, but now Ghadames belongs to ghosts: government handouts enticed its former 6000 Berber inhabitants to modern houses outside the old town. 2. Vila do Ibo, Mozambique Strangler figs wrap their fingers around once-elegant doorways, lofty ceilings gape at the sky and ornamenal balconies rust in the sun. The grand mansions of Vila do Ibo in northern Mozambique’s Quirimbas Archipelgo are earmarked for World Heritage status, but their coral-stone facades are in such an advanced state of disrepair that you’d be forgiven for thinking its already too late to save them. The remains of the town are highly atmospheric, nonetheless. Exploring on foot, you can almost picture the scene two or three hundred years ago, when the air was full of the scent of spices and the yells of visiting seafarers. 3. Gholan Heights, Syria One of the most contentious spots on Earth, the mountains on Syria’s southern border have been occupied by Israel for forty years. The hilltop town of Quneitra was evacuated in 1973, and the Syrians refused to rebuild it, leaving it as a permanent monument to Israeli action. Almost every single building was flattened by the departing Israeli army, giving the streets an eerie feel. The grey concrete roofs of the small houses still lie flat on the ground, around the occasional larger building, left standing, but gutted internally. 4. Djado, Niger Timbuktu? Forget it. A far more intriguing mystery lies hidden on the far side of Niger’s Tenere Desert; here, among vast plains, abandonded villages and intriguing cave art, the mud-brick citadel of Djado rises from palm-fringed pools crammed with bright-green reeds, like some unworldly goblin’s castle. When was Djado built? Why was it abandoned? The hot wind stirs the palms but keeps its secrets. 5. Hanging village of Habalah, Saudi Arabia Appearing to dangle from a 250m cliff face over a deep valley, the deserted village of Habalah is a truly unique settlement. It takes its name from “habi” meaning “rope” – a reference to the ladders that the long-gone inhabitants used to descend to their dwellings from the plateau above. Built out of the rock on which they stand, the houses offer a fascinating insight into traditional Saudi life, and give a whole new meaning to the phrase “living on the edge”.

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