10 Beautiful Abandoned Churches of the World: From Mortuary Chapels to Grand Cathedrals

There’s something almost disconcerting about an abandoned church. The idea of a place for meditation and pious reflection passing quietly away into ruin is somehow spooky: like witnessing a religion itself fall into disuse and die. Perhaps it’s because churches are places designed to invoke feelings of the sublime and trigger thoughts on infinity and death. Perhaps it’s because we subconsciously associate them with horror movies. Either way, there’s something darkly magnificent about the following religious ruins:

Presbyterian Church, Ross Island, India

Lurking in the ruins of the British Ross Island settlement in the Andaman area of India, the Presbyterian Church still shows the scars of the apocalyptic earthquake that nearly levelled it. The walls are broken, the roof vanished and the surviving fragments grown over by a tangle of creepers so thick it sometimes looks like the jungle is spontaneously sprouting brickwork.

Originally constructed to service the men of the East India Company – and subsequently the British Raj – the church was one of the few buildings on Ross Island not to serve some sort of penal function. Just about every other building prior to 1941 was dedicated to the incarceration or abuse of Indian natives. Then in ’41, a devastating earthquake rolled through the settlement. The shock this caused, compounded by the Japanese occupation of the island in 1942, led to the place being abandoned. Today the derelict buildings are a tourist hotspot – among them the mournful remains of the church.

Cathedral of the Transfiguration, Markham, Canada

An abandoned Slovak-style Catholic cathedral in the middle of an empty plain in the wild wastes of Canada, the Cathedral of the Transfiguration seems almost bizarrely out of place. The 20-storey bell towers have a distinctly Eastern European look that sits oddly against the modern Canadian development crouched a respectful distance away; and the entire building gives the feeling of having been ripped up by an angry God and dumped in the middle of nowhere.

Perhaps even odder, though, is its back story. Commissioned by an ultra-rich Slovak immigrant in 1984, the cathedral was never officially finished before the Catholic Church closed it down in 2006. Despite costing millions of dollars and despite a blessing from Pope John Paul II, the doors were officially closed for the last time in 2009; leaving this odd monument to do little more than slowly rot in full view of the residents of Markham.

Hither Green Dissenters Chapel, London

A small, fenced-off and broken chapel in the heart of London’s unloved Hither Green Cemetery, this tiny slice of Victorian beauty is practically unknown even within London itself. Boarded off, closed to the public and buried away from sight, it might seem a strange option for inclusion on a list of amazing abandoned churches. But then you get a close look at it. Etched in humble stonework, sporting a crowning ring of tiny gargoyles, the chapel is a wonderful low-key celebration of Victorian gothic.

Opened in 1873 on purchased farmland, the chapel and cemetery were never meant to blow anyone away, so much as offer some small comfort to grieving locals. Fast forward 140 years and it now stands as a glorious little monument to a certain forgotten type of English church.

Humberstone Church, Northern Chile

You’ve probably never heard of Humberstone. An abandoned saltpetre refinery in the ghastly blank of Chile’s notorious Atacama Desert, it lurks many, many miles from civilisation: a quietly rusting ghost town. Opened in the 1880s, Humberstone and other “nitrate towns” like it became known for the brutal conditions their poverty-stricken workers toiled in; a history mirrored when a number of them were later converted into torture camps by the Pinochet regime. Yet these dark places fostered a unique culture among their workers, one that was officially recognized in 2005 when UNESCO declared Humberstone a World Heritage Site.

At the heart of this empty town lies the abandoned Humberstone Church. Squat and derelict, it’s certainly far less-grand than many places on our list. But it represents an important part of Chilean, Peruvian and Bolivian history, and it’s impossible not to feel a sense of this lost pampinoculture when looking at the pictures. Is it beautiful? No. Is it culturally important? Incredibly so.

Explore Humberstone and other South American ghost towns here.

Abandoned Wood Churches, North West Russia

In 988 AD, Prince Vladimir of Russia issued an edict that all pagan idols be destroyed and wooden churches constructed in their place. Across the country, swathes of old centres of worship were torn down and temporary churches thrown up in their place. Fast forward over 1,000 years and a handful of these “temporary” structures are still there; falling to pieces in the wilds of Northwest Russia.

Looking at them now, the intricacy and size of these churches is nothing short of amazing. While some stand a mere two storeys tall, others tower over the landscape, dwarfing everything in the area. Whereas the Markham cathedral above looked like it was built in the wrong place, these churches seem to have been brought here from the wrong timezone – ancient fantasy structures sitting alongside modern tractors and boys in Adidas clothing. A century or more of neglect means these fantastic buildings will probably soon vanish forever; over 1,000 years after they were first constructed.

Abandoned Church, Bokor Hill Station, Cambodia  

Like the Church of Humberstone in Chile, the Bokor Hill Station Church is notable less for its aesthetic value than for its history. Originally a French colony, Bokor Hill was built on the blood of ordinary Cambodians worked to death by their colonial masters; before becoming one of the last hold-outs of the Khmer Rouge between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Its history is one of careless exploitation and extreme bloodshed on the part of brutal, often psychopathic, elites. All of which today serves to make the abandoned church even more unusual.

A serene, Protestant structure, the squat church looks over the surrounding area with an air of infinite calmness. The only clue as to its murderous history are the rust stains running down its side; which have fittingly given it the appearance of a building drenched in blood. Today the site is owned by a corporation that intends to build a vibrant new city there; one whose inhabitants may never know the violent history of the place they call “home”.

St Nicholas Church, Macedonia

Mavrovo Lake in Macedonia has one of the oddest, most-striking features of any lake on Earth. Reputedly created artificially to power a nearby power station, the lake is also home to several submerged buildings. One of which just happens to be the old St Nicholas Church; now forever semi-flooded, it’s roof and steeple poking out of the freezing water.

Thanks to its unusual condition, the church has become something of a tourist attraction – and it’s easy to see why. With its beautiful red-roofed spire still intact and a wealth of vegetation lazily protruding through its decayed ceiling, the church is a wonder: a fantastic combination of nature and rural decay, plonked surreally down in the middle of a lake. How much longer it will hold out for is uncertain, but there’s no denying that it’s currently one of the most-bewitching sights in a country full of them.

Eglise St. Pierre et St. Paul Church, Goussainville-Vieux Pays, France

Situated a tasteful-but-convenient distance from bustling Paris, Goussainville-Vieux Pays was once a typical French middle-class town. Sadly, that all changed in the early 1970s, when a craft being flown at the Paris airshow span out of control and crashed fatally to Earth. A good chunk of the village was obliterated in the accident, leaving distressed locals with seemingly no choice but to abandon their devastated home.

Today, the church of the former township is the most-distinctive remnant of that forgotten time. Underneath a major flight path, it slowly decays away, visited only by a handful of tourists and intrepid photographers. Perhaps the most-striking aspect is how normal it still looks; as if people still regularly go for services and the town has only been abandoned in the last two weeks. Walking through the streets has a distinct Mary Celeste vibe – not helped by the slightly creepy sounds of airliners jetting over the scene of a devastating aircrash tragedy.

The Churches of Ani, Turkey/Armenia

The border between Turkey and Armenia is a heavily militarised one; an area that always seems to be on the verge of exploding into violence. Unsurprisingly, no civilians choose to call this place home, the towns all being abandoned long ago. But Ani was already long-empty by the time the current border dispute flared up. Constructed in the 9th century, its citizens all fled after a cataclysmic earthquake in 1319; leaving the beautiful “city of 1,001 churches” a desolate ruin.

Nowadays, Ani is nothing but a neglected huddle of buildings in the middle of an empty plain. Yet its remains retain an air of almost unparalleled grandeur: reminders of when Ani challenged Constantinople and Damascus for control of the region. Almost every extant building is religious in some way and plenty show-off an architectural brilliance almost unparalleled in the modern era. Sad and haunting, Ani is the sort of place where you can viscerally feel the combined weight of seven centuries pressing down on the present.

The Orthodox Churches of Kayakoy, Turkey

Abandoned Kayakoy has long been a favourite for urban explorers, amateur photographers and plain ol’ regular tourists. The combination of desolate ruins and weirdly-pristine structures combines to create an otherworldly atmosphere; one shared by the site’s two abandoned Greek Orthodox churches.

Vast, still partially decorated and utterly imposing, the two buildings are little short of magnificent. Light lances in through the open windows, illuminating the dusty stone walls with strange crisscross patterns. Intricate frescos look down from the ceiling onto rooms of incredible construction. The whole place has a sort of simultaneously profane and sacred feel – like being here is somehow something that will get you into trouble. Alone, the churches are buildings of great beauty. Taken with the rest of Kayakoy, they’re nothing short of spectacular.

The Haunted Hotel at Tequendama Falls

The Tequendama Falls Museum of Biodiversity and Culture(Spanish: Casa Museo Salto de Tequendama Biodiversidad y Cultura) is a museum and mansion in San Antonio del Tequendama, Colombia. The museum overlooks Tequendama Falls on the Bogotá River. Before renovation, the building was an abandoned hotel, known as the Tequendama Falls Hotel (La Casa del Salto del Tequendama). The building is presumed to be haunted by the neighbors.

Tequendama Falls (or Salto del Tequendama) is a major tourist attraction about 30 km southwest of Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. The thousands of tourists who visit the area to admire the 157 metre (515 feet) tall waterfall and the surrounding nature, make a stop at another nearby landmark as well, the abandoned Hotel del Salto.

The luxurious Hotel del Salto opened in 1928 to welcome wealthy travelers visiting the Tequendama Falls area. Situated just opposite to the waterfall and on the edge of the cliff, it provided a breathtaking view to its guests. During the next decades though, Bogotá river was contaminated and tourists gradually lost their interest to the area. The hotel finally closed down in the early 90's and was left abandoned ever since. The fact that many people in the past chose that spot to commit suicide, made others believe that the hotel is haunted.

Update: Hotel del Salto has now been turned into a museum. 

The hotel has now been turned into a museum

Hafodunos Hall, an abandoned mansion in Wales

Hafodunos Hall is a house located near the village of Llangernyw in north Wales. It was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, a prominent Gothic Revival architect and bult between 1861 and 1866 for Henry Robertson Sandbach, whose family had bought the estate in 1830. The new house was built to replace a much older hall which had been built in 1674. The site had been occupied since at least 1530 but the remains of both previous houses are untraceable.

The Sandbach family sold Hafodunos in the early 1930s. The building has had different uses since, from being a private girls' school to an old people's home. The nursing home shut down in 1993 as it failed to meet quality standards. In 2004 the largest part of the house was destroyed by a devastating fire, and following that, the whole site was left abandoned. In 2010 the property was bought for £390,000 and the new owners announced their desire to restore the house and use it as a residence.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia

There are two great complexes of ancient temples in Southeast Asia, one at Bagan in Burma, the other at Angkor in Cambodia. The temples of Angkor, built by the Khmer civilization between 802 and 1220 AD, represent one of humankind's most astonishing and enduring architectural achievements. From Angkor the Khmer kings ruled over a vast domain that reached from Vietnam to China to the Bay of Bengal. The structures one sees at Angkor today, more than 100 stone temples in all, are the surviving remains of a grand religious, social and administrative metropolis whose other buildings - palaces, public buildings, and houses - were built of wood and have long since decayed and disappeared.

Conventional theories presume the lands where Angkor stands were chosen as a settlement site because of their strategic military position and agricultural potential. Alternative scholars, however, believe the geographical location of the Angkor complex and the arrangement of its temples was based on a planet-spanning sacred geography from archaic times. Using computer simulations, it has been shown that the ground plan of the Angkor complex – the terrestrial placement of its principal temples - mirrors the stars in the constellation of Draco at the time of spring equinox in 10,500 BC. While the date of this astronomical alignment is far earlier than any known construction at Angkor, it appears that its purpose was to architecturally mirror the heavens in order to assist in the harmonization of the earth and the stars. Both the layout of the Angkor temples and the iconographic nature of much its sculpture, particularly the asuras (‘demons’) and devas (‘deities’) are also intended to indicate the celestial phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes and the slow transition from one astrological age to another.

At the temple of Phnom Bakheng there are 108 surrounding towers. The number 108, considered sacred in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, is the sum of 72 plus 36 (36 being ½ of 72). The number 72 is a primary number in the sequence of numbers linked to the earth’s axial precession, which causes the apparent alteration in the position of the constellations over the period of 25,920 years, or one degree every 72 years. Another mysterious fact about the Angkor complex is its location 72 degrees of longitude east of the Pyramids of Giza. The temples of Bakong, Prah Ko and Prei Monli at Roluos, south of the main Angkor complex, are situated in relation to each other in such a way that they mirror the three stars in the Corona Borealis as they appeared at dawn on the spring equinox in 10,500 BC. It is interesting to note that the Corona Borealis would not have been visible from these temples during the 10th and 11th centuries when they were constructed.

Angkor Wat, built during the early years of the 12th century by Suryavaram II, honors the Hindu god Vishnu and is a symbolic representation of Hindu cosmology. Consisting of an enormous temple symbolizing the mythic Mt. Meru, its five inter-nested rectangular walls and moats represent chains of mountains and the cosmic ocean. The short dimensions of the vast compound are precisely aligned along a north-south axis, while the east-west axis has been deliberately diverted 0.75 degrees south of east and north of west, seemingly in order to give observers a three day anticipation of the spring equinox.

Unlike other temples at Angkor, Ta Prohm has been left as it was found, preserved as an example of what a tropical forest will do to an architectural monument when the protective hands of humans are withdrawn. Ta Prohm's walls, roofs, chambers and courtyards have been sufficiently repaired to stop further deterioration, and the inner sanctuary has been cleared of bushes and thick undergrowth, but the temple has been left in the stranglehold of trees. Having planted themselves centuries ago, the tree's serpentine roots pry apart the ancient stones and their immense trunks straddle the once bustling Buddhist temple. Built in the later part of the 12th century by Jayavarman VII, Ta Prohm is the terrestrial counterpart of the star Eta Draconis the Draco constellation.

During half-millennia of Khmer occupation, the city of Angkor became a pilgrimage destination of importance throughout Southeastern Asia. Sacked by the Thais in 1431 and abandoned in 1432, Angkor was forgotten for a few centuries. Wandering Buddhist monks, passing through the dense jungles, occasionally came upon the awesome ruins. Recognizing the sacred nature of the temples but ignorant of their origins, they invented fables about the mysterious sanctuaries, saying they had been built by the gods in a far ancient time. Centuries passed, these fables became legends, and pilgrims from the distant reaches of Asia sought out the mystic city of the gods. A few adventurous European travelers knew of the ruins and stories circulated in antiquarian circles of a strange city lost in the jungles. Most people believed the stories to be nothing more than legend, however, until the French explorer Henri Mouhot brought Angkor to the world's attention in 1860. The French people were enchanted with the ancient city and beginning in 1908 funded and superbly managed an extensive restoration project. The restoration has continued to the present day, excepting periods in the 70's and 80's when military fighting prevented archaeologists from living near the ruins.

Orthodox archaeologists sometimes interpret the temples of the Angkor complex as tombs of megalomaniacal kings yet in reality those kings designed and constructed the temples as a form of service to both god and their own subjects. The temples were places not for the worship of the kings but rather for the worship of god. Precisely aligned with the stars, constructed as vast three dimensional yantras and adorned with stunningly beautiful religious art, the Angkor temples were instruments for assisting humans in their realization of the divine.

Jayavaram VII, spoke of his intentions in erecting temples as being:

“full of deep sympathy for the good of the world, so as to bestow on men the ambrosia of remedies to win them immortality….By virtue of these good works would that I might rescue all those who are struggling in the ocean of existence.”