Pyramiden: Of mining city to city ghost

Just as if it to have happened an unexpected and instantaneous catastrophe, the small city of Pyramiden conserves still the signs of the human activity that developed there during some few years.



Pyramiden has nothing to do with some pyramids and less than Egypt. This it is found located in the archipelago of Svalbard in the cold one Norway. Nevertheless, this field belonged to the old Soviet Union in the year 1927. It began being founded by the Swedes in the year 1910, for later be become an important center coalminer. The island that receives to this abandoned city considers name Spitsbergen and is found to so alone 620 miles of the North Pole.



The history of this city ghost is used to very to be seemed to that of other mining camps. Once the resource is finished, withdraw businessmen and employed, leaving their constructions and intact memories before the look confused and nostalgic of the visitors. The hasty exit of their inhabitants remains as tangible track in each corner of the city, where can be appreciated still the very orderly glasses in the bars, the intact books in the library and the drawings of the children adorning the walls of its center of studies.

Pyramiden was built by way of an ideal village, where they did not lack the infrastructure and necessary institutions. It was moreover, a self-sufficient village, based on the social model of the already vanished Soviet Union.


The food was free, and the village included a greenhouse where they cultivated their vegetables and they arranged also of farms with abundant cattle. The sports complexes and of entertainment also they been present. If it disappeared the life in other places of the planet, Pyramiden would not be informed and to have been able to continue with its life and development normally.

The alone inhabitants took charge of extracting the coal and nothing more. Nevertheless, this would not last for always. January 10, 1998, the owner of the Soviet business Arctikugol Trust, decided that the project did not go more and that the city should be abandoned immediately. And thus it was like happened, the notice was given so alone with an anticipation hours pair, and the settlers and industrious they withdrew of the land that for many years became its home.

Finally we relate that you at present a project exists by which is sought to revalue the zone, becoming a destiny tourist for the curious travelers, that upon arriving they will be found with a city that apparently stopped in the time.