Every "must see before you die" list is the same forty places. Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, repeat. They're famous for good reasons and I'd go to all of them, but there's another category of attraction that never makes those lists: places that exist because one person had an obsession, or because an industry packed up and left, or because geology did something completely unreasonable and then kept doing it for fifty years.
These ten are the good kind of strange. A few are genuinely unsettling, one is an amusement park inside a salt mine, and two of them are still burning. All of them are real places you can actually visit, which is the part that gets me.
Sedlec Ossuary, Czech Republic
A small chapel outside Kutná Hora is decorated, floor to ceiling, with the bones of somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 people. Not stored. Decorated. Plague victims and war dead piled up in the cemetery here for centuries, and in 1870 a woodcarver named František Rint was hired to do something about the heaps. What he did was build furniture out of them.
There's a coat of arms made of bones, garlands of skulls strung across the ceiling, and a chandelier that is said to contain at least one of every bone in the human body. Rint signed his work on the wall, in bones. It should feel horrifying and mostly it doesn't, partly because the whole thing is oddly beautiful and partly because medieval Europe had a very different relationship with death than we do. Photography inside has been banned since 2020, which honestly improves the visit. Kutná Hora itself is a UNESCO town worth the rest of the day.
Museum of Broken Relationships, Croatia
Two artists in Zagreb broke up, couldn't decide what to do with the things they'd accumulated together, and turned the problem into an exhibition. It toured, people everywhere started sending in their own objects, and in 2010 it became a permanent museum in the Upper Town. It won a European museum award the following year, which tells you it's a serious institution and not a gimmick.
Each object comes with a place, a length of relationship and a short anonymous note. There's an axe a woman used to chop up her ex-girlfriend's furniture. There's a wedding dress in a jar. There's a garden gnome, a prosthetic leg, a toaster. Some of the notes are funny and some knock the wind out of you, and it takes about an hour to go from laughing to sitting on a bench quietly. Best museum in Croatia and it isn't close.
Salina Turda, Romania
Salt has been dug out of this hillside in Transylvania since at least the 13th century. Mining stopped in 1932, the Second World War turned the chambers into a bomb shelter, and for a while afterwards somebody stored cheese in there. Then in 2010 Romania reopened it as an underground amusement park, roughly 120 meters below the surface.
There's a Ferris wheel in a mine shaft. There's a lake at the bottom with rowing boats. Mini golf, bowling, a small amphitheatre, and hundreds of vertical light tubes hanging down the walls like something out of a science fiction film. It stays around 10 to 12 degrees all year and the salty air is sold as a respiratory treatment, which is how you'll end up sharing your rowing boat with someone's grandmother and her asthma. Romania does not get enough credit for this one.
Kolmanskop, Namibia
In 1908 a railway worker picked up a shiny stone in the sand near Lüderitz, and within a couple of years there was a German town out there in the middle of the Namib, complete with a ballroom, a skittle alley, an ice factory and a hospital that had the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. Diamonds paid for all of it.
Then the diamonds ran out, richer fields opened up further south, and by 1956 everybody had gone. The desert has been moving back in ever since. You walk through doorways into rooms where the sand is waist deep and pouring down what used to be a staircase, with the wallpaper still on the walls. It sits inside a restricted diamond area, so you need a permit, which the tour operators in Lüderitz sort out. Namibia is full of empty landscapes, and this is the one with furniture in it.
Isla de las Muñecas, Mexico
The canals of Xochimilco are what's left of the lake system the Aztecs farmed, and today most of the traffic is painted party boats with mariachi bands. Two hours deeper into the waterways there's a small chinampa where the trees are hung with hundreds of dolls: dismembered, sun bleached, missing eyes, covered in cobwebs.
A man named Julián Santana Barrera lived there alone. The story he told was that a girl had drowned nearby and that he hung the dolls to calm her spirit, and he kept doing it for about fifty years until he died in 2001. It's the single creepiest place I know of that is also, underneath the horror-movie surface, just a memorial built by a grieving man. Hire a trajinera at the Cuemanco dock and agree the price before you leave, because it's a long round trip and the cheap boats won't go.
Mano del Desierto, Chile
Eleven meters of concrete hand sticking out of the ground, 75 kilometers south of Antofagasta, with nothing around it in any direction. Mario Irarrázabal built it in 1992 and it reads differently depending on your mood: someone drowning in the sand, or something enormous digging its way out.
The Atacama is the driest desert outside the poles, which means there is no weather to speak of and the light is absurd. The hand gets tagged with graffiti regularly and cleaned just as regularly. It's a two hour detour off the Pan-American Highway if you're heading toward San Pedro de Atacama, and it's worth stopping for, if only because there's a real strangeness to standing next to it with the road empty in both directions.
Coober Pedy, Australia
Summer in the South Australian outback regularly goes past 45 degrees, so the people who came here for opal did the logical thing and moved underground. More than half of Coober Pedy's residents live in what they call dugouts: houses carved into the hillsides, where the temperature sits around 23 degrees all year without any air conditioning at all.
There are underground churches, underground hotels, an underground bookshop. The golf course is played at night with glowing balls because the grass gave up decades ago, and players carry a small piece of turf to tee off from. Above ground it looks like a mining site on another planet, which is why film crews keep coming here to shoot post-apocalyptic scenery. In Australia this counts as a normal town.
Hashima Island, Japan
From a boat it looks like a warship, which is where the nickname Gunkanjima comes from. It's a lump of rock off Nagasaki that Mitsubishi turned into an undersea coal mining operation, and at its peak in 1959 more than 5,000 people lived on roughly six hectares, in concrete apartment blocks built right to the sea wall. For a while it was the most densely populated place on earth.
The mine closed in 1974 and everyone left within weeks. What's there now is a decaying concrete city that typhoons are slowly taking apart, and it became the model for the villain's island in Skyfall. It was listed by UNESCO in 2015, which remains contested, because Korean and Chinese labourers were forced to work here during the war and that history took a long time to get acknowledged properly. Tours from Nagasaki land only when the sea is calm, and you stay on a marked walkway.
Darvaza Gas Crater, Turkmenistan
In the middle of the Karakum desert there's a hole about 69 meters across that has been on fire for roughly half a century. The usual story is that Soviet geologists drilling for gas in 1971 collapsed the ground into a cavern, decided to burn off the escaping methane so it wouldn't poison anything nearby, and assumed it would go out in a few weeks. The details are disputed. The fire is not.
Locals call it the Door to Hell and the standard visit involves camping beside it, because it's only impressive after dark. Turkmenistan's president has twice announced that it should be extinguished, and it's still burning. The real obstacle is getting in: tourist visas here require an approved tour and a letter of invitation, and plenty of applications simply get refused, which makes this the hardest entry on the list to actually tick off.
Kawah Ijen, Indonesia
Two strange things are happening in this volcano in East Java at the same time. The crater holds the largest highly acidic lake in the world, a turquoise body of water with a pH close to battery acid. And sulfuric gases escaping from vents at the edge ignite on contact with air and burn electric blue, which you can only see in the dark.
So the hike starts around one in the morning, you need a gas mask, and the descent into the crater is steep and genuinely unpleasant. The part that reframes the whole experience is the miners. They break solidified sulfur out of the vents by hand and carry baskets weighing 70 to 90 kilograms up the crater wall and down the mountain, twice a day, for a few dollars a load, while wearing a wet cloth instead of a mask. Indonesia has hundreds of volcanoes and this is the one that stays with you.
Why Go to Weird Places at All
The honest answer is that strange places tell you more about a country than beautiful ones do. A bone chapel explains something about how a society handled mass death. An underground town explains a climate. A rotting island explains an industry and what happened to the people who worked in it. You don't get any of that from a cathedral you've already seen on a fridge magnet.
The Line Between Curious and Ghoulish
Three of the places on this list are somebody's grief, somebody's workplace, or somebody's forced labour. That doesn't mean don't go. It means go properly: pay the local guide rather than the international operator where you can, don't stage a funny photo on a memorial, and ask before you point a camera at a man carrying 80 kilos of sulfur. Dark tourism becomes tacky at exactly the point where the place stops being real to you and turns into a backdrop.
Put the Strange Places on the Map
Namibia, Turkmenistan, Romania and East Java are not countries most people can point at confidently, which is part of why these places feel so far away. They're usually much easier to reach than the map in your head suggests.
Fix that map with Memory Map, then see how you do on Pinpoint when the labels come off. If you'd rather test the trivia behind the places themselves, try Geo Quiz. And if all this has made you want a normal holiday instead, the month by month guide to warm weather is the opposite of this article in every way.