Dark tourism: eight scary places that resemble what man or nature can do

While most tourists are attracted by monuments, historically significant places or locations where they can relax in some way, a certain group prefers the so-called dark tourism (dark tourism). These are visits to places that are in some way associated with death and / or suffering.

You can find a number of lists of so-called dark tourist destinations on the Internet, but our website is dedicated to science and technology, so we have selected eight sites that are somehow related to these topics. In our list, you will not find concentration camps, battlefields or prisons, but places where natural or technical disasters took place.

Chernobyl nuclear power plant

It is one of the most visited “dark tourist” places Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Several thousand people travel every year to soak up the atmosphere of an abandoned city, in which time seems to have stopped (specifically in 2016 it was 24 thousand tourists). Interest in this location grew even more after the HBO television station broadcast the Chernobyl series, which corresponds to reality.

Chernobyl nuclear power plant

On Saturday, April 26, 1986, at 1 hour 23 minutes and 40 seconds, the fourth reactor accident occurred at the fourth reactor unit to date. The subsequent explosion caused the release of large amounts of radioactive particles and infestation of a wide area.

He is currently entering the closed zone due to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine unfortunately you don’t get it. However, even before that, it was not freely available for security reasons – visitors had to have a permit issued by the Ukrainian authorities. It included excursions to the nuclear power plant and a visit to the abandoned “ghost town” Pripyat.

September 11 National Monument and Museum

On September 11, 2001, a coordinated attack took place, during which three were abducted airliners crashed into major American buildings. Two of the planes crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the third hit the west side of the Pentagon. A fourth plane was reportedly crashing into a destination in Washington, but instead crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a passenger riot.

September 11 National Monument and Museum

The incident, which was to be caused by members of the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, claimed almost 3,000 lives. The biggest emotions were aroused by the collapse of two skyscrapers, which were broadcast by television stations around the world. Over time, conspiracy theories have argued that such a collapse of high-rise buildings could have occurred within tens of minutes of a plane crash.

Today, in New York, it is the site of the original “Twins” memorial to the victims and the people involved in the rescue and recovery. Probably the most impressive feature is the section, located 30 feet (about 9.1 meters) below street level, with artificial waterfalls that symbolize the loss of life and physical emptiness that remained after the attacks. The reflective character of the place is underlined by the planting of more than 400 white oaks.

Peace Monument in Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, the United States fired about 600 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima atomic bomb. Three days later, they conducted a similar operation on Nagasaki. The number of victims is estimated at 129 to 226 thousand, most of whom were civilians. This event is the only one where nuclear weapons have been used in an armed conflict.

Peace Monument in Hiroshima

The memorial museum is a call to action for all of humanity: “No more Hiroshima” and hosts exhibitions of artifacts from the explosion and its victims, as well as the testimonies of survivors. The museum was founded in August 1955 together with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall and today is the most popular destination for school trips from all over Japan and foreign visitors.

The exhibit gathers and exhibits victims, photographs and other materials that illustrate the horrors of this event, supplemented by exhibits describing Hiroshima before and after the bombing. It is included model showing damage caused by the city and several letters between scientists and top officials of the time talking about the development of nuclear weapons and the expected consequences of their use.

Semipalatinsk test area

Semipalatinsk test area is an abandoned steppe locality in eastern Kazakhstan that was used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War for most nuclear weapons tests. It was therefore the equivalent of the Nevada Testing Center (NTS) in the United States, but unlike it, it was closed for good in 1991.

Semipalatinsk test area

Since then, the area is partially accessible to adventurous travelers. Apart from the NTS, no other place on Earth has had as many nuclear explosions as this polygon, and for that reason alone, it must be one of the darkest places in the world. But there are other scary aspects.

Test site – a large steppe area of ​​18,000 km² – elected Stalin’s head of national security, the infamous Lavrentiy Beria. According to him, it was an uninhabited location, although it was not really true. It is not entirely clear whether this was an oversight or not he deliberately made civilians part of a large experiment.

In addition to several thousand peasants, nomads, herders and cattle breeders in the area of ​​the test site, the city of Semipalatinsk (now Semey) with 150,000 inhabitants was located in the immediate vicinity. It was close enough to be directly threatened by a fallout.

More than 450 nuclear test explosions took place in its vicinity, of which well over a hundred were atmospheric, ie detonated either in the air (dropped from aircraft), from towers or directly on the ground.

Titan Rocket Museum

Titan Rocket Museum, also known as the Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, is a former intercontinental ballistic missile base located about 40 miles south of Tucson, Arizona in the United States. Now there is a museum run by the non-profit Arizona Aerospace Foundation, which includes a deactivated Titan II rocket and the original launcher.

Titan Rocket Museum

The site is intended to serve as a reminder of what was once the strongest part of the US nuclear program. It illustrates the terrifying readiness of the great powers for a total nuclear armageddon during the Cold War. The tour also includes a simulated start and start of a nuclear apocalypse, which would mean the Third World War.

The original missile contained a W-53 warhead with a power of 9 megatons. It was about the most powerful thermonuclear devicethe United States has ever placed on a rocket. It was surpassed only by the older B41 air nuclear bomb, which had a theoretical maximum power of 25 MT, or some versions of Soviet missiles, whose warheads reached up to about 15 MT.

One such bomb could destroy a metropolis like New York or Paris. Only its fireball would be about five kilometers in diameter, leaving a mushroom cloud rising in the atmosphere to a height of 37 kilometers.

Wreck of the Titanic

Wreck of the Titanic is a remnant of one of the greatest tragedies that persists in public perception, the subject of countless books, movies, documents, etc. The allegedly unsinkable ship collided with a glacier in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland on its first voyage in 1912.

Wreck of the Titanic

The ensuing chaos, lack of lifeboats and frosts have caused one of the worst disasters with the largest number of casualties in the history of civilian shipping: more than 1,500 drowned or died of hypothermia. Only about 700 people survived, which was only a third of all people on board.

In 2012, a hundred years after the ship sank, the legend saw a further increase in media attention and tourist activities. Special voyages were planned to the place where the ship sank, exhibitions were opened in several places and appeared offers exclusive dives to the wreck itself.

In special deep-sea submarines, only a very small handful of very mobile “tourists” sank to the bottom of the Atlantic to see the wreck with their own eyes.

The question everyone is asking at this point is: can the shipwreck really be visited? Yes and no, but for most mortals the answer is no. Still, it worked. After the huge success of the 1997 film, tourism pioneer Mike McDowell began offering deep ocean expeditions to the wreck in 1998.

He used the same Russian submarines that James Cameron used for his shots and for the documentary National Geographic. As expected, the price for this privilege was exorbitant at £ 21,000.

Pompeii

Let’s move from man-made disasters to an ancient event during which nature showed its strength. We move to Italy, specifically near Naples, where we can find the ruins of a once prosperous city Pompeiiwhich was destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Today, Pompeii is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Pompeii

At the beginning of our era, Pompeii faced two devastating natural events. First, it was a strong earthquake in 62 that destroyed about two-thirds of the city. This was fixed in a relatively short time, but seventeen years later, the wells dried up suddenly.

At the end of the summer of 79, the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius came, during which a mixture of hot volcanic gases, fragments of magma and volcanic ash destroyed everything in its path.

Although the inclusion of Pompeii among the dark tourist sites can arouse astonishment, the long time since the event cannot reduce the destruction of the eruption, which was a thousand times stronger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Thanks to the huge amount of ashes that covered the city, the monuments are incredibly well preserved and thus serve as a statement about times long past.

Montserrat

Montserrat is a volcanic island in the Caribbean, whose former capital Plymouth turned into “modern Pompeii” in the mid-1990s as a result of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano. Since then, only the northern third of the island is habitable. We must warn potential visitors that the volcano is still active.

Former capital of Plymouth on the island of Montserrat

As in Pompeii, the misfortune did not come by itself. Tropical Paradise Island, popular with pop stars, was first hit by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Just six years later, the island volcano Soufriere Hills, which had been inactive for hundreds of years, suddenly woke up.

The capital of the island of Plymouth on the southwest coast had to be evacuated, at first only for a limited time, but was eventually abandoned in 1997. It was affected not only by ash fallout, but also by pyroclastic currents. Constant landslides of volcanic material have since contributed to the gradual burial of a once prosperous center of life.

What you can see is largely due to the activity of the volcano. When active, the view can be dramatic, but access to most zones is impossible. On the contrary, if less active, you can get closer to the main dark attraction of the island: its former capital Plymouth, today a ghost town covered with 10 to 12 meters of hardened ash and mud.