Eerie ghost towns around the world

In 2005, the hamlet of Cavallerizzo in southern Italy was severely damaged by a landslide after a period of prolonged rainfall. Thirty buildings were destroyed and about 310 inhabitants had to be evacuated to nearby villages. But Liliana Bianco, an elderly lady, decided to stay. Together with her dogs, she remained the only inhabitant of Cavallerizzo.

Craco, a small town located in Basilicata, only about 150 kilometers (93 miles) away from Cavallerizzo, has been a ghost town since 1963. Here, too, landslides, flooding and an earthquake caused the once prosperous hill town to be abandoned. Since then it has been the setting for many famous films, for example Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and the James Bond film "A Quantum of Solace."

The town lies only a few kilometers from the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant and was built in the 1970s to house the plant's workers and their families. On April 26, 1986, technicians at Chernobyl conducting a test inadvertently caused reactor number four to explode. Authorities evacuated 120,000 people from the area, including 43,000 from Pripyat.

An abandoned Ferris wheel stands on a public space in Pripyat. Today, Pripyat's apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, hospitals and schools are derelict and its streets overgrown with trees. The city lies in the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl, where hot spots of persistently high levels of radiation will make the area uninhabitable for thousands of years to come.

Bjelolasica in Croatia is waiting for investors to revive the ski resort. Ten years ago, many people wanted to build their winter quarters right next to the ski slopes. Today, many of these planned buildings are abandoned and for sale. Since the retreat of investors, the whole village has fallen silent and locals who worked in the city have lost their jobs.

In the abandoned Chinese fishing village of Houtouwan on Shengshan Island in east China's Zhejiang province, vines climb up the old stone walls, weave through the windows and doors, and creep along the crumbling paths. Houtouwan has been reclaimed by Mother Nature.

Kolmanskop in the Namib Desert was once home to hundreds of German families who flocked to the area to try and make their fortune in diamond mining in the early 1900s. Kolmanskop soon resembled a German town and was also home to Africa’s first tram. Diamond production, which had peaked by the early 1920s, went into decline until it finally halted in 1954.

Kolmanskop was once home to over 1,000 people. Now, the houses in the former German diamond mining town near Luderitz are filled with desert sand. A surreal scene!

People walk on the roof of an abandoned nine-story building in Orbita, around 240 kilometers (150 miles) south from Kyiv. Missing from maps, Orbita is a ghost town hiding in the pine forests of central Ukraine. It was abandoned in the 1980s but is now filling with families who are fleeing the war between the government and pro-Russian separatists in the east.

Nicolas sits at the entrance of his bookstore in Goussainville, outside Paris. Goussainville is a French ghost town abandoned forty years ago by inhabitants who refused to live underneath a flight path used by planes serving the country’s largest airport in neighboring Roissy. Some obstinate residents still live there, surrounded by empty houses.