Fabbriche di Careggine is a medieval village in the Apuan Alps of Tuscany, in the Garfagnana region, said to have been founded around 1270 by blacksmiths who came from the Brescia area — its name, recalling forges or workshops, reflects that metalworking past. By the mid-twentieth century it was a small stone hamlet of about 146 people in 31 families, gathered around the Romanesque church of San Teodoro, when it was chosen to be flooded for hydroelectric power. A dam was built on the Edron river to impound Lake Vagli, and the village vanished beneath the new reservoir.
What sets Fabbriche di Careggine apart from most drowned villages is that it has been brought back into full view not by drought but by deliberate engineering. To carry out maintenance on the dam, the reservoir has been completely drained several times since the flooding, and on each occasion the entire village has re-emerged largely intact — its stone houses, three-arched bridge, cemetery and church standing in the empty basin of the lake. These rare drainings have turned the ghost village into one of Tuscany’s most striking attractions.
The reservoir was emptied in 1958, again in 1974 and 1983, and most recently in 1994, each time drawing crowds eager to walk the streets of a village that normally lies beneath the water; the 1994 reveal alone drew roughly a million visitors to the Garfagnana over a few months. That 1994 draining remains the last full exposure, and the prospect of another has become a perennial local hope and a recurring subject of news and tourism speculation in the decades since.
Fabbriche di Careggine therefore occupies an unusual place among the world’s lost settlements — a drowned village that can, in principle, be resurrected on schedule. Its periodic returns make it both a poignant memorial to a community displaced for electricity and a curiously hopeful counter-example, proof that some places taken by reservoirs need not be gone forever, but can be emptied back into the light.
Potosí was a small Andean town in the highlands of Táchira State, in western Venezuela, that for most of the twentieth century lived a quiet life of coffee, cattle and subsistence farming around a modest church and central plaza. It was evacuated in 1984 — the order famously delivered when President Carlos Andrés Pérez flew in by helicopter to announce the town’s fate — and deliberately submerged in 1985 to make way for the reservoir of the Uribante-Caparo hydroelectric complex, one of the largest power schemes ever attempted in the Venezuelan Andes. Roughly 1,200 people were relocated as the rising water closed over their streets, and the reservoir, covering some 20 square kilometres, swallowed the town beneath the new lake.
For the next quarter-century Potosí existed only as a rumour and a single visible marker — the cross atop the drowned church, which stood just high enough to break the surface and remind boatmen and travellers that a town lay beneath them. The cross became the town’s epitaph, a small dark crucifix above an otherwise featureless expanse of water, and one of the most photographed images of Venezuela’s dam-building era.
In 2010 a severe drought, intensified by an El Niño cycle that crippled Venezuela’s heavily hydropower-dependent electricity grid, dropped the reservoir so far that the entire town climbed back into the light. Streets, house walls and the roofless church re-emerged from the cracked, sun-baked mud, and former residents walked back into the place they had been forced to abandon a generation earlier. The reappearance drew national and international attention, both as a haunting spectacle and as a stark visual measure of how badly the country’s reservoirs had fallen. The pattern repeated during later droughts, including a pronounced re-exposure in 2016.
Potosí has since slipped beneath the water again as levels recovered, returning to its half-life as a cross above a lake. It endures as a layered symbol — of the human cost of large hydroelectric projects, of the fragility of a power system that depends on rain, and of the way a single religious marker can outlast an entire community and keep its memory afloat.
Ashopton and Derwent were two villages of the upper Derwent Valley in the Derbyshire Peak District, submerged in the mid-1940s by the creation of Ladybower Reservoir. The reservoir was the third and largest in a chain built to supply water to the growing industrial cities of South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, following the earlier Howden and Derwent dams upstream. Construction of Ladybower began in 1935, the buildings were demolished by autumn 1943, and the impounded waters had drowned both villages by the end of 1944.
Before the flooding, residents were relocated, buildings were demolished or stripped, and bodies from Derwent’s churchyard were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere. The most striking landmark of the doomed valley was the spire of Derwent’s church, deliberately left standing as a memorial, which continued to protrude above the waterline after the reservoir filled. It became a melancholy tourist curiosity until 15 December 1947, when it was dynamited because it was judged unsafe and a hazard to the public.
Ladybower and its sister reservoirs acquired a second, famous chapter: the upstream Derwent and Howden dams were used by the RAF’s 617 Squadron to rehearse the low-level ‘Dambusters’ bouncing-bomb runs ahead of Operation Chastise in 1943, and the valley remains tied to that wartime story. The combination of lost villages and aviation heritage has made the area one of the most visited corners of the Peak District.
Ashopton and Derwent are not gone for good — at least Derwent is not. In severe droughts the falling reservoir exposes Derwent’s stone foundations, garden walls, the old valley road and the footings of its packhorse bridge, drawing crowds who walk among the ruins. Dry summers such as 1976, 1995, 2018 and 2022 produced especially complete re-emergences. Ashopton’s remains, by contrast, lie buried under silt and are not expected to reappear.
Old Adaminaby was a high-country town on the Monaro tablelands of New South Wales, settled in the gold-and-grazing era from the 1830s and serving the surrounding pastoral district for more than a century. In the 1950s it stood directly in the path of Lake Eucumbene, the central storage reservoir of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — one of the largest engineering projects in Australian history. As the Eucumbene Dam rose, the town was condemned, and rather than simply abandoning it, authorities undertook one of the country’s most ambitious town relocations.
In a 1954 referendum residents chose a new site, and from 1956 the population of around 700 to 800 was resettled while roughly 100 houses and two churches were jacked up, loaded onto trucks and hauled some 9 kilometres to a new townsite that kept the name Adaminaby. Moving a single house could take six days to travel barely 10 kilometres. The original town was then submerged beneath the rising waters in 1957. The move preserved many individual structures but scattered the community across a new layout, severing the link between buildings, streets and the river flats that had given the old town its character.
Unlike many drowned settlements, Old Adaminaby was never permanently lost from view. Lake Eucumbene is a deep working storage that fluctuates dramatically with rainfall and the demands of the hydro scheme, and in dry years the lake retreats far enough to expose the bones of the old town. The severe drought of the mid-2000s, peaking in July 2007 when the lake fell to about 8.7 percent of capacity — its lowest level since filling — laid bare foundations, fences, road alignments, tree stumps, fire hydrants and the footprints of the school and houses.
The re-emergence turned the lost town into a periodic attraction and a focus of heritage interest, with former residents and descendants walking streets they had not seen in fifty years. The influx of sightseers also brought souvenir-hunting, prompting a conservation order over the site in 2007. New Adaminaby, with its relocated churches and houses, remains a living settlement, making this a rare case of a community physically carried away from its drowning rather than merely dispersed by it.
Villa Epecuén was a lakeside spa resort developed in the early 1920s on the shore of Lago Epecuén, about 7 kilometres north of Carhué in the Adolfo Alsina district of Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. Built around the lake’s intensely salty, mineral-rich water — second in salinity only to the Dead Sea and roughly ten times saltier than the ocean — it grew into one of the country’s most popular therapeutic-tourism destinations.
At its height the town had a permanent population of around 1,500 but could host at least 5,000 visitors, supported by up to 280 businesses — hotels, guesthouses, lodges, shops and bathhouses. From the 1950s to the 1970s some 25,000 tourists came each season, arriving by road and rail to soak in the salt water’s reputed health benefits. It was, for half a century, a thriving and prosperous place.
Villa Epecuén’s downfall came from the lake it depended on. Lago Epecuén sits in a closed basin with no natural outlet, so a long run of unusually wet years steadily raised its level. On 6 November 1985 a seiche — a wind-driven oscillation of the lake — broke a nearby dam and then the dyke protecting the town, and the water rose progressively, eventually reaching a depth of about 10 metres by 1993.
For roughly a quarter of a century the town lay drowned in brine. Around 2009 the water began to recede, exposing a haunting landscape of salt-bleached, skeletal ruins — gutted hotels, a roofless slaughterhouse and dead, white tree trunks — that has since drawn tourists, photographers and filmmakers. One former resident, Pablo Novak, returned to live alone amid the wreckage, remaining the town’s sole inhabitant until his death in 2024.
Vilarinho da Furna (also written Vilarinho das Furnas) was a small mountain village in the parish of São João do Campo, municipality of Terras de Bouro, in the Braga district of northern Portugal. Built of granite on the banks of the River Homem in the Serra do Gerês, it was famous far beyond its size for an ancient and unusually durable tradition of communal self-government, with social roots often traced to remote antiquity.
The village was run not by a single landlord or a remote authority but by an assembly of household heads — a council known as the Junta, with one member per family — that collectively managed shared pasture, herds, water, ovens, mills and labor. This system, made famous by the Portuguese ethnographer Jorge Dias in his classic study “Vilarinho da Furna: Uma Aldeia Comunitária,” made the village a celebrated example of a living communal society in twentieth-century Europe.
That society was extinguished in 1972, when the Cávado Hydroelectric Company (HICA) completed a dam on the Homem for hydroelectric power and flooded the valley. The roughly 300 inhabitants — 57 families across some 80 houses — were paid out and resettled, and the granite village disappeared beneath the new Vilarinho das Furnas reservoir, within what is today the Peneda-Gerês National Park.
Because a reservoir’s level rises and falls, Vilarinho da Furna never vanished completely. In dry years its walls, lanes and doorways re-emerge from the water, drawing former residents and visitors, while a dedicated ethnographic museum preserves the tools, documents and memory of one of Portugal’s most remarkable lost communities.
Shicheng — the “Lion City,” named for the Wu Shi (Five Lion) Mountain at whose foot it stood — was an ancient walled city in Chun’an County, Zhejiang Province, whose history as a county seat reaches back to the Tang Dynasty around AD 621. For more than a thousand years it served as the political, economic and cultural heart of the surrounding county, its streets lined with temples, memorial archways and merchant houses behind defensive stone walls, and it reached its architectural high point under the Ming and Qing dynasties.
In 1959 the city was deliberately and permanently submerged to impound the reservoir behind the Xin’an River (Xin’anjiang) hydroelectric dam, the first large hydropower station independently designed and built by the People’s Republic of China and the first dam in the country to exceed 100 metres in height. The rising water formed Qiandao Lake — the “Thousand Island Lake” — and the inundation of the wider basin uprooted roughly 290,000 people, drowning two ancient county towns, more than two dozen smaller towns and over 1,300 villages along with tens of thousands of acres of farmland.
Unlike most drowned settlements, Shicheng was not demolished before the waters came; it was left largely intact and sank whole. Resting today between about 26 and 40 metres beneath the surface, sealed away from sunlight, wind, rain and most oxygen, the city has survived in extraordinary condition — wooden beams, carved stone lions, dragons and phoenixes, and hundreds of archways standing as they did before 1959.
Rediscovered by divers in 2001 and brought to global attention around 2011, when the site was placed under provincial heritage protection, Shicheng is now celebrated as a “Chinese Atlantis” and a rare time capsule of imperial-era architecture. Sheltered from sun, wind and rain, its carved lions, archways and timber survive in a condition no above-ground monument of comparable age could match. It draws technical divers and has prompted repeated proposals to survey, protect or commercially present the sunken city to visitors, even as it remains physically out of reach of most who would see it.
The old village of Graun (Italian: Curon Venosta) lay in the upper Vinschgau valley of South Tyrol, close to where Italy meets Austria and Switzerland. In 1950 it was deliberately drowned when an electricity company raised the water level of the area’s lakes by 22 metres, merging the natural Reschensee, Mittersee and Haidersee into a single large reservoir, Lake Reschen (Reschensee), for hydroelectric power. The flooding destroyed 163 homes and some 120 farms and forced the relocation of roughly 150 families — around 1,000 villagers in all — ending the existence of the old village. From the new lake rises the village’s surviving landmark — the fourteenth-century Romanesque bell tower of its old church of St. Catherine (Santa Caterina) — which has become one of the most famous and haunting images in all of Italy.
Graun was a German-speaking Alpine farming community whose roots in the Tyrol long pre-dated Italian rule over South Tyrol, which only began after the First World War. The plan to dam the high valley dated to the late 1930s, was interrupted by the Second World War, and was pushed through in the late 1940s by the power company Montecatini despite sustained local protest. The villagers’ resistance went as far as petitions to Rome and an appeal to the Vatican, and even an eleventh-hour intervention by the Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) failed to halt the project. In the summer of 1950 the church bells were removed, the buildings demolished, and on 9 July 1950 the floodgates were opened; over the following days the valley floor — including the most fertile farmland in the district — disappeared beneath the rising reservoir.
The single structure spared was the fourteenth-century bell tower of the old parish church, which was protected as a historic monument and left standing in the water. For the families who lost their homes it is an ambiguous relic: a beautiful tourist attraction that is also a permanent reminder of an injustice. In hard winters, when the lake freezes, visitors can walk across the ice to the base of the tower; in rare drainings for maintenance, foundations of the old village briefly re-emerge from the lakebed.
The drowning of Graun has come to symbolize the vulnerability of a small ethnic-minority community to industrial power and a distant state. The story has been kept vivid in popular culture, most notably by Marco Balzano’s acclaimed 2018 novel *Resto qui* (“I Stay Here”) and by the 2020 Italian Netflix series *Curon*, both of which draw on the lost village. The bell tower in the lake remains the enduring emblem of a community that was told its home was the price of progress.
Kalyazin is an old Volga town in Tver Oblast whose historic lower districts were partly drowned in 1939–1940 during the creation of the Uglich Reservoir, one of a cascade of Soviet hydroelectric schemes on the upper Volga. The town’s monumental St. Nicholas (Nikolsky) Cathedral was demolished ahead of the flooding, but its tall freestanding bell tower, built between 1796 and 1800, was deliberately left standing in the water — partly for use as a navigation marker on the new reservoir. The result is one of the most striking and widely photographed images of Soviet-era inundation: a white classical belfry rising alone out of the river, with no town visible around it.
Kalyazin had grown up on both banks of the Volga around a famous monastery, and gained town status in 1775. Its riverside quarters were dense with churches, merchants’ houses and market streets. When the Uglich hydroelectric station was built downstream, the rising water permanently submerged the lowest part of the old town, including the cathedral square, and several thousand residents of those districts had to be moved to higher ground. Most of the threatened buildings were razed before the flood; the bell tower was the conspicuous exception.
Left isolated in the reservoir, the 74.5-metre tower became both a hazard and a symbol. Over the decades its base was reinforced and an artificial islet was built around it to halt its lean and protect its foundations, allowing boats to land and visitors to approach. Far from being a quiet ruin, it has become a celebrated landmark of the Volga: a stop on river cruises, an occasional site of Orthodox services, and an instantly recognizable emblem of what the dam-building era erased.
The belfry’s survival is, in the end, a story about utility rather than reverence. It was kept because it was useful — as a lighthouse and a fixed point on the water — not because the state set out to preserve a memorial. Yet in surviving, it has become exactly that: a single white spire standing for the vanished lower town and for every Volga community altered or partly drowned by the cascade of mid-century dams.
Mologa was an ancient Russian town at the confluence of the Volga and Mologa rivers, roughly 32 kilometres upstream of Rybinsk in what is now Yaroslavl Oblast. First mentioned in the chronicles in 1149, it grew over centuries into a prosperous merchant centre famous for its medieval fairs, with stone churches, two monasteries and a population that by the early twentieth century numbered around 5,000. Its low, flat position on the Volga floodplain — the very feature that had made it a thriving river port — also made it the obvious sacrifice when Soviet engineers chose to dam the upper Volga.
Between 1936 and 1941 Mologa and the surrounding district were systematically emptied and demolished to make way for the Rybinsk Reservoir, an artificial sea impounded for hydroelectric power and navigation as part of Stalin’s industrialization drive. When the gates of the Rybinsk dam closed in April 1941 the floodwaters began to rise, and over the following years the town disappeared beneath the new reservoir, which reached its design level around 1947. Mologa was only the most prominent of hundreds of settlements lost: across the basin some 130,000 people were resettled, the largest forced relocation of any single Soviet dam project.
The scale of the loss, the use of forced labour to build the dam, and the impossibility of voicing dissent under Stalin combined to make Mologa a uniquely silent catastrophe — one whose grief was never officially recorded. In the decades since, it has become known as the “Russian Atlantis,” a phantom town that periodically rises from the shallows. In dry years, when the reservoir falls, the outlines of streets, foundations and cemeteries reappear, drawing former residents and their descendants on boat pilgrimages back to the place their families were torn from.
Mologa today survives as memory rather than as a place. A dedicated museum of the Mologa region, opened in Rybinsk in 1995, preserves photographs, documents and salvaged objects, and an annual gathering of “Mologzhane” — Mologa people and their families — keeps the community alive in spirit long after its physical erasure. The town has come to stand, in Russian public memory, for the human cost hidden beneath the country’s great mid-century engineering achievements.
The Lost Villages were ten communities along the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario — Aultsville, Dickinson’s Landing, Farran’s Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette, Santa Cruz, Sheek’s Island, Wales and Woodlands — that were permanently submerged on 1 July 1958 to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Moses-Saunders power dam. Roughly 6,500 people were displaced in the event remembered locally as Inundation Day, when a controlled blast on a cofferdam let the river flood the valley over the following days.
The villages occupied land first settled by United Empire Loyalists from 1784, and many families had farmed the riverbank for generations. They were strung along the old King’s Highway No. 2 and the railway corridor, with farms, mills, cheese factories, churches, schools and stations forming a settled, century-and-a-half-old landscape. The joint Canada–United States project required raising the river to form Lake St. Lawrence, which meant flooding some 20,000 acres of inhabited shoreline between Iroquois and Cornwall.
The relocation was handled with bureaucratic thoroughness by the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (Ontario Hydro). Between 1955 and 1957, some 500 buildings — whole houses among them — were lifted onto giant movers and transported intact to two newly built towns, Ingleside and Long Sault, while structures too large or fragile to move were demolished or burned. Cemeteries were exhumed and their dead and headstones reinterred before the water came.
Today the old roadbeds, sidewalks and foundations lie beneath Lake St. Lawrence and are visited by divers, while Aultsville’s railway station and other rescued buildings survive on land. The Lost Villages Museum at Ault Park near Long Sault, run by the Lost Villages Historical Society, preserves relocated buildings and archives, and nearby Upper Canada Village incorporates heritage structures saved from the flood — keeping alive the memory of communities erased in a single planned day.
St. Thomas was a Mormon farming town in the Moapa Valley of southern Nevada, founded in 1865 by pioneers led by Thomas S. Smith near the confluence of the Muddy and Virgin rivers with the Colorado. At its height it was home to roughly 500 people, with a school, hotel, shops, a garage and a soda fountain, sustained by irrigated desert agriculture. It was abandoned in 1938 as the rising waters of Lake Mead, impounded behind the newly completed Hoover Dam, slowly drowned the town.
The town’s history was bracketed by two displacements. The first came in 1871, when a boundary survey placed the settlement in Nevada rather than Arizona; when Nevada demanded several years of back taxes payable in gold, many settlers abandoned the site and moved to Utah. New Latter-day Saint settlers rebuilt St. Thomas in the 1880s, and it grew into a substantial valley town on the Arrowhead Trail auto route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles before the federal dam project doomed it for good.
When Hoover Dam was completed and Lake Mead began to fill, the federal government bought out residents and the town was gradually inundated. The last holdout, Hugh Lord, is said to have rowed away from his home as the water reached it on 11 June 1938. For decades the town lay submerged beneath the reservoir, its location marked only on old maps.
Falling reservoir levels have since repeatedly resurrected St. Thomas. The ruins re-emerged in 1945 and 1963, and the sustained Colorado River drought of the 2000s and beyond — with notable exposures around 2002 and 2012 — has left much of the townsite walkable again. The National Park Service maintains an interpretive trail through the salt-crusted foundations within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, where the ruins now serve as a stark gauge of the river’s decline.
Capel Celyn was a small Welsh-speaking farming community in the Tryweryn valley northwest of Bala, in what was then Merionethshire and is now Gwynedd. Around 67 people lived in the valley itself, clustered along the River Tryweryn in twelve houses and farms, with a chapel and cemetery, a school and a post office at the heart of communal life. It was one of the last places in Wales where the population was effectively Welsh-only speaking, making it a stronghold of the language and a symbol of a self-contained rural Welsh culture.
In 1965 the valley was deliberately flooded to create Llyn Celyn, a reservoir built to supply Liverpool and the Wirral with water for industrial use. Liverpool City Council had secured the necessary powers through a private Act of Parliament — the Liverpool Corporation Act 1957 — a route that allowed the corporation to proceed without needing planning consent from any Welsh local authority. The inundation submerged every building in the village, displacing 48 of the 67 valley residents and erasing a living community in the name of an English city’s water security.
The drowning of Capel Celyn became one of the defining episodes of modern Welsh political history. The fact that 35 of Wales’s 36 Members of Parliament opposed the bill (the 36th abstaining) yet were unable to stop it laid bare how little weight Welsh democratic opinion carried at Westminster in the 1950s. The episode galvanised Plaid Cymru, fed a current of direct action that included bombing the construction site, and is widely cited as a catalyst in the long campaign that eventually led to Welsh devolution.
More than half a century later, Capel Celyn endures less as a place than as a slogan. The graffiti motto “Cofiwch Dryweryn” — “Remember Tryweryn” — painted on a ruined wall near Llanrhystud became a national rallying cry, and Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology in 2005. The reservoir still supplies water, but the valley beneath it remains a wound and a warning in Welsh memory.