Original subtitles

Tom ward: A vast, ornate structure

abandoned high in the pyrenees mountains.

It's a surprising building to find in that location.

A wrecked research facility in Russia's arctic tundra.

Something that looks completely bizarre,

we actually have a window into the interior of our planet.

A mysterious military base lost in the American desert.

Looks like it was hit by an atomic bomb.

And a towering maze of concrete beams.

So, creating these large, flowing, beautiful shapes

is actually quite challenging.

Once, they were some of the most advanced structures

and facilities on the planet,

at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today, they stand abandoned,

contaminated and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how?

And why were they abandoned?

On the border of France and Spain,

a tiny village of just 500 people

sits in a steep-sided valley.

At this remote location,

4,000ft up in the pyrenees mountains,

are the remains of a gigantic derelict structure.

Rob bell: It's a surprising building to find in that location.

It's grand, it's almost palatial.

And yet, there it is,

plonked down in the middle of the pyrenees mountains

with not that much of civilisation around it.

It's neither a disused factory nor power plant,

but rather a glass and marble palace.

Its ornate three-storey facade

has 365 windows

and 156 doors...

And it stretches 800ft

along the narrow valley floor.

The idea that anybody would build

something so grand

in a place that is almost impossible to get to,

that is astonishing.

Immense effort has gone into creating beautiful buildings

with a mix of classicism and art nouveau...

So why is it here,

isolated in the mountains?

And why was it abandoned?

In the mid-19th century,

Spain was still largely cut off

from France and Europe by the pyrenees.

This mountain range stretches 260 miles along the border.

The lack of trade routes

severely restricted the nation's economy.

The Spanish government realised that they desperately needed

a transport route through the mountains.

The idea of a train line

that would cross the pyrenees

was extremely appealing,

and when it was undertaken,

it was a massive engineering project.

It was almost like a Panama canal type of project,

with super-long tunnels

and Bridges.

Years of very, very challenging engineering.

The central connection point was this,

the canfranc international railway station.

Building was underway in 1923.

Its critical importance lay in overcoming

a specific engineering miscalculation.

When early Spanish railways

developed in the late 1800s,

engineers decided to employ

a broad Gauge track of 5'5".

Yet France,

along with most of Europe,

matched the international Gauge of 4'8.5".

It was a fateful decision.

There was no way of physically altering

the track width or wheel Gauge.

Spanish trains ran on a different width of track

than French trains,

so they had to find a station big enough

to unload the French trains,

load everything onto the Spanish trains

or vice versa.

The only solution was to create a transfer point

from one track Gauge to the other.

So canfranc had to be constructed

on a huge scale.

Completed in 1928,

it was one of the longest and highest-altitude rail stations

in Europe.

It was dubbed the 'Titanic of the mountains'.

By building this huge, impressive station in the pyrenees,

it would open up new,

strong trade routes into France

and then into the whole of Europe.

Fernando Sanchez morales

is the current mayor of canfranc.

On 18 July, 1928,

king Alfonso of Spain formally opened canfranc station

and declared, "the pyrenees no longer exist."

With border protection,

a hotel, restaurants

and 2,000 staff,

canfranc rivalled any of the major stations of Europe.

Spain, they think, has finally arrived

and is once again a player in Europe.

But dark clouds loomed large on the horizon.

A year later,

the wall street crash sparked the great depression

and, by 1936,

king Alfonso was in exile,

with Spain in the grip of a bloody civil war.

Rebel nationalist leader general Franco ordered

the vital somport tunnel be blocked

to prevent arms reaching

the republican government.

Canfranc becomes the last stop

on a railway to nowhere.

The canfranc station had the misfortune

of sitting right on kind of a geopolitical fault line.

Tunnels were closed for a time

then because the Spanish government

was afraid of people smuggling in supplies.

The station was commandeered

by Franco's army

as the Spanish general employed the help of Adolf Hitler

to quash republican and communist forces.

For Hitler, it provided an arena

to test out his latest weapons,

armoured units and planes

of his newly created luftwaffe.

In 1939,

Franco secured victory

and established himself as fascist dictator.

The station reopened,

but its tumultuous existence was set to continue.

A flood of Jews and refugees,

fleeing persecution of Nazi Germany,

passed south through the station.

Ironically, at the same time,

Franco sent shipments of supplies through canfranc

to help feed Hitler's war machine.

Gold and metals for the production of arms

poured through the mountains

and across the border.

When the Nazis invaded France in the second world war,

canfranc station provided

a really important railway link

for Jewish refugees escaping France into Spain.

But going the other way,

it also provided a route for the Germans

to export gold ore

from Spain into France

and effectively into the German reich.

It was also a through-route

for agents engaged in acts of espionage.

This train line was a vital link

between southern France

and, essentially, the outside world.

It allowed

supplies and information,

travel, to the French resistance.

They were even used for some spy missions,

where some very brave young women would carry packages of information

out to Spain,

where they would ultimately be delivered on

to the allies in britain.

In a final twist of irony,

as the war progressed,

canfranc became a key escape route,

not for Jews,

but Nazis.

With defeat appearing ever more inevitable

through 1945,

Nazi leaders flooded through,

carrying tonnes of looted gold.

Because almost the only way to get from France into Spain

and onto a ship to somewhere else in the world,

because that requires you to get off the train at canfranc,

to walk through canfranc station...

That one facility

becomes a route for evil people

to get away and seek safety

in South America.

After the war,

with just a trickle of international passengers,

the majestic halls of canfranc

grew more and more shabby and neglected.

And 42 years after it opened its doors,

it was forced to shut down for good.

As vital as it was,

the rail line was never profitable.

And then in 1970, there was a train accident

that destroyed one of the Bridges.

They never rebuilt it.

I think it became kind of an excuse

to let the rail line just fall into decay.

Because by that time,

air travel was becoming more affordable,

highways were better,

trucks were better,

they had more alternatives

to this very difficult railroad line.

With the rail line out of action,

canfranc was abandoned in the 1970s

and left to rust.

Today, the station's opulence and grandeur remain for all to see.

A lot of travellers wanna make a pilgrimage

to see this magnificent train station

and there's something poignant about

people working so hard on some ambitious technology

and infrastructure that never quite works

and then it has to be abandoned

and it just kind of slowly rots away.

We may never truly know which Nazis

and what treasures passed through these platforms.

Those secrets may forever stay hidden

in the shadows of the pyrenees mountains.

But canfranc station

may yet live to see another day.

Around 2,500 miles northeast,

on the kola peninsula

where Russia meets Norway,

is a deserted industrial site.

A cluster of dilapidated buildings

is surrounded by lakes

and forgotten in this barren arctic tundra.

The only living creatures to be seen

are arctic rabbits taking shelter

amongst the debris.

Well, the kola peninsula is extremely remote.

It's very, very far north, almost to the north pole.

Ruined concrete buildings

are littered with twisted wreckage

and smashed equipment.

And at the centre of all this carnage,

one building appears to have been ripped apart.

There's all of these buildings, partly derelict.

What was going on here?

Was it some sort of concentration camp?

Was it some sort of military base?

So, what took place

in this bleak and inhospitable corner

of Russia's arctic north?

And why was this site abandoned?

In the 1960s,

the Soviet union was embroiled

in a military and technological race

with its ideological Nemesis,

the United States.

The cold war was played out

in a nuclear arms race and a space race,

but they were also engaged in a race

to better understand our own planet.

A scientific investigation of the geology

hidden thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.

At the moment,

the way that we look inside the earth

is through what we call seismic waves.

You make a big explosion on the earth's surface

and we see the way the shockwaves travel into the earth

and back out again.

And we come up with structures, we find barriers in there.

But what are they?

In the '60s and '70s,

there was this huge fascination with the structure of the earth

and trying to figure out

if you could drill down through the earth's crust,

the top layer, into the mantle,

which is the soft kind of plastic layer

that lies under the crust.

It was almost like a subterranean space race,

who could get down the deepest first?

This complex is the site of an extraordinary project

to uncover the secrets of the earth's geological structure.

This is the kola superdeep borehole.

Just nine inches in diameter,

this simple and unremarkable metal lid

opened a new scientific frontier

and it was undertaken in direct competition with the usa.

In the '60s, the Americans had started a project

called mohole

to try to dig down through the crust.

They didn't get very far, but they learned a lot.

On Guadalupe island, Mexico,

American geologists penetrated

just 601ft into the seabed...

Though this was 11,600ft

beneath the surface of the water.

The Russians, however, were aiming to achieve

more than four times that depth.

Their main target was to hit 15,000m

or 49,000ft.

And then the Russians came back in 1970

with this superdeep borehole.

Drilling in this cold location gave them

one distinct advantage.

The kola peninsula sits in an area of very, very old crust,

it's called a shield,

really old crust,

and what's important there

is that the temperature increase as you go with depth

is very light,

so you have much more chance

of getting deeper before it gets too hot.

Could the Soviets dig deeper into the earth's crust

than humans had ever managed before?

Construction of this desolate facility

began in 1965...

And in may 1970,

drilling was underway.

The prize for Soviet engineers

was not just outdoing the usa.

It was gaining new geological data

and access to the earth's resources.

Despite its extreme and remote location,

this base offered them the best chance of success.

This is a very out-of-the-way place.

They had to bring

in all the materials and expertise,

but the Soviet union did a lot of that.

They were good at infrastructure

and building big,

sophisticated bases in remote locations.

Sergei nesterenko

is a Russian engineer

and experienced drilling this challenging borehole.

The first problem they encountered

was one of basic physics.

The borehole was only nine inches in diameter,

but the immense torque created by having to turn drill tubing

that weighed over a million pounds

made the task impossible.

Soviet engineers turned to a radical new solution...

An annular-shaped core drill.

The technology with drilling

is you actually just have the drill bit

at the end and moving.

You force mud and other things down to keep this thing moving

and that's where it's grinding away at the rock.

And in between, you can take out,

essentially, the shaft of rock, what we call the core,

and look at the structure of the earth.

As they ground deeper and deeper,

the drilling process became

ever more fraught with difficulty.

The deeper you drill,

the harder it is to manage the drilling process.

Equipment can get stuck in the hole,

the temperatures get really high,

the rock doesn't behave properly.

So this was a huge technological achievement

for its day.

For over a decade,

they drilled into the crust using a 200-tonne,

200ft-high drilling machine

housed in a huge yellow tower

in the centre of the borehole site.

Drilling deep into the earth's crust at an average

of 196ft a month

wore out 25 miles of piping

simply from the friction and heat.

Despite these difficulties,

kola became the deepest hole in the world,

reaching an astonishing 39,000ft

below the surface.

Dan dickrell: The borehole beat the world record in 1979.

It was almost 40,000ft below the surface,

which is an amazingly deep distance when you think about it.

The marianas trench,

which is the deepest place in the ocean,

is not even near that deep.

As news of the incredible depths

being reached by the kola site was released...

Rumours about its discoveries began to spread.

The fact that the borehole had been dug so deeply

was used to create a hoax,

which was called the 'well to hell'.

You listened really close and put a microphone underneath,

you could actually hear people screaming.

This was later debunked as a complete hoax

but the fact that the hole goes so deeply

ignited people's imagination.

Drilling continued down

to more than 39,500ft...

At which point drilling was suspended for a year.

This led to catastrophe.

When work resumed,

the drill twisted off.

16,000ft of drill pipe

had to be abandoned in its shaft.

When you're drilling

so deep into the earth's crust,

you're actually miles away from where you are on the surface

and you're drilling and drilling away.

That's one thing.

If you then take the drill bit out

and then you try and re-enter the hole,

that's when it can cause many, many problems.

It's like trying to find that needle

in a haystack down to where you were drilling before

and the drill bit itself can get stuck

and you can break the drill string.

And in this instance,

thousands of feet of drill string were broken.

Engineers now had to start a new hole

from an offshoot

at 23,300ft.

It took another five years

to borehole down to the amazing depth

of 40,230ft.

But at this incredible depth,

drilling became practically impossible.

The Soviets discover that, when you get far enough underground,

the rocks are no longer rocks.

'Cause as you go down,

it starts getting hotter

and, as it gets hotter, it's harder for the equipment,

for your drill equipment to hold up,

but also the rock itself begins to get a little bit soft,

it begins to flow a little bit like silly putty.

With their equipment failing rapidly

as they encountered staggeringly high temperatures,

the engineers at kola had no option

but to halt drilling.

Though they failed to reach their target depth,

they pushed scientific knowledge of the earth's structure

further than ever before

and made astonishing discoveries.

One thing that surprised them was they discovered a lot of water deep,

deep down in the borehole,

way below where you would find groundwater

or any effects of ocean water.

Dan dickrell: Scientists also found

there was a tremendous amount of hydrogen trapped in the rocks,

which was completely unexpected.

They theorised it came from water

that had been squeezed so strongly

that it actually released hydrogen gas.

They're not the only discoveries they made.

The micro-fossils found that deep

were actually single-celled organisms

that had existed long, long ago

and scientists were very surprised that

life could even exist or could be found that deeply.

The kola borehole managed

to penetrate nearly a third of the way

through the baltic continental crust.

It is the deepest artificial point on earth,

a record it still holds today.

Due to a lack of funding,

however, Russia closed the facility in 2005.

Today,

a simple welded steel plate

is the only sign that the world's deepest hole

lies directly beneath your feet.

You wouldn't necessarily know,

but you could be standing on that little metal plinth,

that beneath you,

there's more than seven miles of knowledge

of what's going on inside the earth's surface.

And that, to me, is really fascinating.

From something that looks completely bizarre,

we actually have a window

into the interior of our planet.

Nearly 5,500 miles to the west,

in southern California,

is the salton sea...

A shallow, saline body of water

that covers 350 square miles

of the Colorado desert

and lies directly on the San Andreas fault.

It's an extraordinary feature

of the California desert,

a 30-mile-long lake

in middle of the wilderness.

On the northeast corner,

sun-bleached timbers

reveal the remains of an old dock

half-buried in the desert sand.

Rotting fish strewn along the beach

fill the air with the smell of death.

You have desolation and, basically, decay.

It's like a graveyard.

A solitary building has been blasted by the elements

and its crumbling remains

overlook the Sandy shore.

But occasionally revealed by the morning sands

are broken concrete roadways,

half-buried bunkers,

the foundations of long vanished buildings

and two 4,000ft-long runways.

There's dead fish along the shoreline.

It's one of the most famous

post-apocalyptic landscapes

in all of the United States.

Why was this mysterious installation built

in such a remote and hostile area of desert?

And why was it abandoned?

In December 1944,

teams of scientists began arriving

at an air station just south of salton city.

They were part of a vital mission,

to beat Nazi Germany in the race to develop the atom bomb.

While us forces were embroiled in a bloody pacific war,

the joint army-Navy z-46 group

started conducting classified tests.

Codenamed 'project y',

this mission to design

and build the first atomic weapons was part of the Manhattan project.

Salton sea was chosen as a key location.

The salton sea was ideal for the Manhattan project

and its aerodynamic testing.

It was for two reasons.

It was completely isolated

and, two, that afforded it secrecy.

In the middle of more than 20,000 acres of barren desert,

this site became a top-secret testing range,

the results of which remain largely classified to this day.

Leon lesicka is a local resident

and his brother worked as a security guard

at the testing site.

They did a lot of practice here,

which was pretty secretive.

In fact, very secretive.

You will not see anything as demanding

of coordination, cooperation

and integration across industry,

academia and the military

as the Manhattan project.

The tests undertaken at this location

were coordinated from here,

the naval auxiliary air station, salton sea.

Codenamed 'Sandy beach'...

This was an ideal site for testing the ballistic

and aerodynamic behaviour of different bomb designs.

If you're going to drop the most powerful bombs ever,

you have to be absolutely certain

you're dropping them with precision.

America's atomic bombs

were designed to be dropped by b-29 superfortresses.

From 31,000ft,

they exploded 2,000ft above ground.

Teams of observers had just 43 seconds

to assess the performance of each bomb

before it crashed into the sea.

Telemetry was used to assess data relating everything

from pressure and temperature to vibration

and to acceleration.

You have almost no cloud cover in a desert,

so if you drop a bomb in daylight,

you can see exactly where that thing is.

That's the target out there that they used to try to hit,

about 1.5 miles out there.

Although it was 400ft away from the base,

the target was practically invisible to the b-29 bombers above.

Pilots had to be able to drop their bombs accurately,

otherwise they would not survive a real bomb run.

A high-pressure blast wave travelling

at 1,100ft per second

would knock them out of the sky.

By 1944/'45,

they're doing a vast amount

of ballistics testing,

because a very slight modification in the shape

or length of a bomb on the tail fins

can affect the performance.

Andrew gough: Salton sea base

became ground zero

for the dropping

of five-tonne concrete bombs.

This is where the testing took place,

supposedly, for Hiroshima.

By the summer of 1945,

still unable to test a live warhead at this site,

the trials at salton sea

were critical to demonstrating

that the weapons would hit their targets first time.

You had aircraft that had automatic cameras

and, when they're dropping live bombs,

you can see where every bomb falls

and then survey and Mark that spot exactly,

and you might even be able to recover the bomb itself.

Scientists and engineers

are testing over and over again,

to make sure

that the electronic components

that are going to make all of that technology turn

into the most powerful blast

the world had ever seen

and work exactly as advertised

and exactly the way the engineers

and the scientists want it to go.

More than 120 test bombs were dropped

at the salton sea base.

Some casing designs, however,

prove less than accurate

and four of the giant missiles still lie out in desert

where they missed their target

and burrowed deep into the sand.

They did drop something right in the centre

of the tennis court,

which didn't go over too big.

I guess that's how you learn.

During testing,

the fat man atomic bomb

experienced a violent wobble when dropped.

Yet at salton sea,

this problem was resolved.

The addition of a distinctive,

box-like tail containing eight fins,

named a California parachute,

suppressed the wobble

and improved accuracy.

Because of the aerodynamic investigations conducted here

and the live atomic bomb tests

at the white sands missile range in new Mexico,

america was able to deploy

both the fat man and little boy bombs

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

in August 1945

at once, they caused unparalleled death

and destruction

and secured allied victory

against the Japanese empire.

Salton sea was vitally important to the Manhattan project.

Nobody can afford to have the brain power

that's been assembled

for the Manhattan project

build a bomb that's not gonna hit the target.

For several years after the war,

testing for the nuclear program continued at the base.

In the 1950s and '60s,

the nearby salton city

became a popular recreational resort

and military secrecy was increasingly compromised.

In 1971,

the base was shut down and abandoned.

Today, the area has been

reclaimed by the sand

and the salty environment has eaten away at the buildings.

There is little left of the salton sea base

to show how vital its contribution was

to allied victory during world war ii.

There's no plaques, there's no statues,

nothing to tell you that this was once a very important site.

All that remains

is a stark reminder of the perils of nuclear development

and the cost of all-out war.

Across the Atlantic ocean

in continental Europe,

30 miles south of the Belgian capital, Brussels,

a desolate industrial area spreads

along the banks of the river sambre.

Looming like a monolith over the wasteland

is a squat concrete tower.

It is around 200ft in diameter at its base

and rises 354ft into the air.

Its corrugated sides slope upwards

to reveal a gaping mouth.

It's certainly impressive. It's amazing to see.

Roma agrawal: It's quite beautiful.

They've got these really flowing shapes.

Mysteriously,

the wide base is pierced all around

by numerous gaps.

The tower's interior looks like

an unfinished beehive,

covered with rotting wooden slats

and weed-clogged channels.

What lies behind

the bizarre features of this massive tower?

And why was it abandoned?

In 1921,

the city of charleroi

was part of Belgium's industrial heartland.

Yet, having suffered four long years

of German occupation during world war I,

its hundreds of factories were struggling for power.

Despite Belgian neutrality,

Germany's invasion of 1914 was followed

by a thorough dismantling of Belgian industry.

It was part

of what historians sometimes call

the 'rape of Belgium'.

To help drag the nation's economy back to its feet,

a state-of-the-art power station was proposed.

The enormous power plant im.

In the process of generating power,

typically steam engines are utilised.

To make steam, you need water

and when you make steam, that water gets quite hot.

To create new steam, you need to take the hot water,

cool it down

and then recreate steam.

The power plant was one of the largest of its kind

in Europe.

At its heart was a dramatic cooling tower,

designed to cool the water back down

and produce more steam-based energy

by burning coal.

We all recognise a cooling tower when we see one

and that's because they've got that characteristic shape.

It's called a hyperboloid,

this 3D form that's quite wide at the base

and then it kind of funnels in

before coming back out again at the top.

The reason they have this shape

is because as the air, the warm air,

is drawn up through that tower,

it's accelerated through that funnel where it narrows

and that draws more air in from underneath, cooler air,

which does the job of a cooling tower.

To produce steam-based energy,

the tower was able to cool

an incredible 480,000 gallons of water

every minute.

But this was only possible

because of the unique use of its cone-like hyperboloid shape.

The hyperboloid shape of a cooling tower

is extremely effective in terms of heat transfer

between the hot water and the rising air.

In that way,

the design is persistent through time,

it's a very classical and effective way

to do what you need to do.

For all its simplicity,

the tower itself was no easy build.

The hyperboloid shape

was not simply a matter of styling,

but a brilliant solution to creating mass without weight.

So, creating these large, flowing, beautiful shapes

is actually quite challenging,

because if any of you have ever tried

creating that shape just on a pottery wheel that size,

it's really hard.

You're trying to use formwork and moulds to create this.

You need to change

the way the mould fits the higher you go

so that you get your curvy shape.

You're at a height, as well,

and you're trying to pour concrete down here,

and then think about doing all of that

without computers.

So you're basically sitting there with a pencil

and a piece of paper,

working out what you need to do

and then doing it on this really grand scale.

The plant started operating in 1921.

Hot water from the plant's machinery

was blasted into the tower

through its central vent.

It was collected

in hundreds of shallow channels

designed to increase its surface area

and lower its temperature rapidly,

with extreme economy.

They're using this principle

that hotter air is less dense

and therefore lighter, and cooler air is more dense

and therefore heavier.

And so what happens in these towers

is that the hot air rises up

and the cool air stays at the base.

And the shape here helps

and gives it a bit of an aerodynamic quality

to allow this flow to happen very smoothly.

Through the interwar period,

the new plant successfully helped

power huge industrial expansion in Belgium.

From 1940, however,

Belgium was again under German occupation

and the plant's output was diverted to serve

their Nazi overlords.

In the post-war years,

it continued to serve Belgians

and, by 1977,

it was the main source of energy in the charleroi area.

Yet engineers at the time had no idea

that hanging over its future

were two deadly by-products.

Lurking in the channels of the tower

was a killer disease.

Inside a cooling tower,

it's warm and it's damp

and at the exact temperature in those conditions,

they can become a breeding ground

for legionnaire's disease,

which can be fatal.

However, the tower continued

to operate effectively for decades

without any fatalities,

yet its days were still numbered.

The coal-powered plant was also producing

alarmingly high levels of carbon dioxide.

A report found it responsible for 10%

of the total co2 emissions in Belgium.

This was followed by Greenpeace protests

in 2006

and, a year later,

it was forced to close down.

Considered too unsafe

and contaminated to be repurposed...

The site lies abandoned.

Today, the futuristic appearance

still amazes the few people

prepared to penetrate its daunting maze

of concrete beams.

It is now being preserved

as an icon of design

for future generations.

After decades of being seen

as a piece of industrial engineering,

its beauty has actually shone through

and that's the reason they now want to keep it.

Now nearly a century old,

power plant im and its iconic cooling tower

show that when engineers get a design right,

it becomes timeless.

For me,

I just love the mathematical and structural perfection

that these towers represent.

Now abandoned,

they were once on the cutting edge of human engineering.

Within these decaying structures

are the echoes of history.

They speak of war

and terror,

but also of exploration and human endeavour.

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