Original subtitles

(Edgy music)

Tom ward (narrates): A shocking relic

of a cruel cold war regime.

There's dormitories,

there's what looked to be classrooms.

There's workshops, it's a big mystery.

The eerie streets of a sunken pirate city

in the Caribbean.

The harbour walls are crumbling in to the sea

and the whole area has been left to collapse.

An infamous plantation in america's deep south.

There is a sense of foreboding

that something might have happened here

that you can't quite figure out what.

And a shadowy subterranean complex

that helped win a war.

Looking at these doors,

never in your wildest dreams

could you imagine what lies beyond.

Decaying relics and ruins of lost worlds.

They were forged by the passing years

and are now haunted by the past.

Their secrets are waiting to be revealed.

In the middle of the adriatic sea near the coast of Croatia

is an island few holidaymakers dare to visit.

It's a moonscape, barren.

There are mountains of rock piled up here, there,

it's a palette of grey and white.

It's pretty barren,

there's not a lot of tree cover for shade or for breaking the wind.

This is an island that is not the least bit welcoming.

It is stark, it is burned and it's dead.

Stretching up the hillside is a series of stepped ruins,

really just the outlines of walls.

If you look a little more closely

you start noticing some sinister elements.

As you see this place surrounded by fencing,

machine gun posts and barbed wire

and the mystery kind of thickens.

This was a place built for a dark purpose.

This is an island dedicated to breaking the human spirit.

This is a place designed to dehumanise.

What was this settlement used for?

Who lived here and were they being held

against their will?

This sterile rocky outcrop is goli otok.

Local historian darko bavoljak has spent many years exploring it.

This is an island where paranoia and violence

reached their height.

The more you investigate the island,

the more intriguing it becomes.

As you get closer there's,

you know, sleeping quarters, there's an auditorium.

It's hard to know what this place is.

There is no readily apparent reason

why you would build this semi industrial facility

on an island in the middle of the sea.

Goli otok's isolated location is key to understanding its past.

Because it's off the coast, anything can happen out there,

the fate of the people there will never be known.

Look at the bunkers.

This is a place that is designed to be patrolled,

designed to be defended.

But it's not in any way clear

what was worth guarding and patrolling here.

In fact, goli otok was a brutal prison

which was sometimes called the 'Croatian Alcatraz'.

The first prisoners arrived on this island on July 9, 1949.

After that around 12,000 convicts passed through this place

and they built everything that you can see here.

But why did someone go to such lengths to build a prison

on this barren rock far out to sea and way out of sight?

After the second world war,

goli otok was a part of communist yugoslavia

which was then closely aligned with Moscow.

But in 1949, the infamous dictator Marshall josip tito

split yugoslavia away from the Soviet union

and its leader, Joseph Stalin.

Not all yugoslavians agreed with tito's decision.

Many wanted Soviet style communism to remain.

But the ruthless dictator had a harsh way

of dealing with dissenters.

Tito wants to be able to take people

he thinks are loyal to Stalin and make them disappear.

Tito's cold-blooded pursuit of power

saw him turn upon his own people.

He had thousands of political prisoners rounded up

and sent here to the prison on goli otok.

This is tito's gulag.

The buildings are a stark reminder

of the immense paranoia of a regime that didn't trust its own people.

They would spend years

living under the harshest conditions,

huddling on this limestone island

protected by a few blocks, being worked nearly to death.

The punishing regime saw inmates

digging a huge network of tunnels

and forced to construct the very fortifications

that were keeping them imprisoned.

There are more than 100 bunkers on this island.

Many were used to stop prisoners escaping.

Those unfortunate enough to end up here

were subjected to tito's ruthless re-education

program,

a sinister operation that turned progressively darker.

Here is a place that was built, built up,

made almost brutally magnificent

in its ability to cause people misery and pain

so that they would be compliant.

Yugoslavia's notorious secret police

kept a close watch on the whole thing.

Fear of being snatched away

and sent to goli otok became part of Yugoslav life.

The psychological trauma is immense.

Imagine being literally disappeared,

being seized for crimes you don't even know

you're being accused of so quickly

and so secretly that even your friends and family

don't know where you've gone.

None of those who arrived at this prison

had actually been tried in court.

They were simply arrested and seized and sent here

and often on the slightest pretext for just discussing

other communist countries openly.

Sometimes people executed their personal grudges

by informing upon people

that had not really committed any political crimes.

They just wanted to see them sent to goli otok.

The prison had a unique way of maintaining discipline

among its inmates.

Although a small number of senior officials

were placed in charge of the gulag,

they weren't responsible for keeping order.

The prison discipline was actually carried out

in large part by the inmates themselves.

So, when newcomers arrived the older inmates

were forced to whip them as they passed by.

Those who survived sometimes Rose through the ranks

to meet out their own form of brutality

as barrack supervisors.

The barrack supervisor was the master of life and death,

he could order any prison to viciously beat another.

These brutal conditions created a kind of prison hierarchy

where prisoners were encouraged to humiliate each other,

to inform on one another, to beat one another.

Everybody was an informer, everybody was an abuser,

everybody was violent, and nobody felt safe.

About 600 died on the island which means,

you know, thousands returned to the mainland

after being broken and re-educated

but those that came back, they didn't dare say a word.

What were they afraid of?

What if someone informed on them again

and they were returned to goli otok?

These fears rippled through Yugoslav society until 1989

when the fall of the Berlin wall marked the beginning of the end

for the communist system.

Tito's gulag was closed down.

Today the crumbling buildings of goli otok

are a haunting reminder

of tito's shocking totalitarian regime.

All of us in the west,

we allowed ourselves to think

that unlike the other communist dictatorships,

tito's dictatorship was not founded

on brutality and prison camps.

Of course, we were wrong.

In the swampy wetlands of Louisiana in the usa

lies a sprawling site with an extraordinary story to tell.

It seems entirely otherworldly,

because you've got the bayou,

you've got the strange wildlife,

you've got snakes crawling through the grass,

you've got crocodiles.

It's pretty forbidding.

In this landscape not only do you have

the remains of buildings like brick foundations barely exposed.

We also have existing structures, very, very simple wooden structures,

simple cabins.

They are, you know, placed one here in a field,

one a little bit further away, one a bit further away.

These are very, very basic living quarters,

very simple shacks quickly thrown together

and barely hanging together today.

These buildings in Louisiana, usa,

and the abandoned machinery

that lies submerged in the steaming swamps around them,

are clues about a murky history.

In the distance you can see some kind of a crane

or an industrial facility.

And some other heavy equipment

lying around in a state of disrepair.

So, it looks we're coming

upon basic agricultural establishment

but for what exactly?

There is a sense of foreboding,

that something might have happened here

but you can't quite figure out what.

Who were the workers that called this place home?

And how were their lives entwined with the war that divided america?

This place is certainly a puzzle, perhaps it has an industrial past?

A small train

and other assorted bits of machinery rust away

in the humid southern climate.

But the cluster of shacks and a deserted school

hint at a lost community.

Paul Leslie is a local historian who has spent years

studying the history here.

I came here around 1977

and so I pretty much discovered it then

and I was just completely stunned

by the presence of so many buildings.

It was like a time capsule.

The story begins with a product that was in demand across the world,

sugar.

What we're seeing here is a sugar plantation,

a kind of agriculture that was very common

in the us in the 19th century and before.

And sugar was really an integral part

of the Louisiana economy

because it was the ultimate cash crop.

This isn't just any sugar plantation.

It's Laurel valley

and it was once one of the largest plantations

in North America.

In the 1830s, a family by the name of Tucker arrived

and took over this land

and began building up the plantation.

But their ambition came with a high price.

The Tucker family arrive with a couple of dozen slaves.

Within 20 years they have almost 170 slaves.

It's a phenomenally large slave holding family.

The process of making sugar was a really brutal one

and it was incredibly difficult for the labourers involved.

At the heart of the operation was the mill.

This is the old sugar mill.

It's built in the 1840s,

built with bricks that were made on the plantation by the slaves.

And then assembled painstaking

something like 366,000 slave-made bricks.

The mill was operating 24 hours a day,

it never shut down unless equipment broke.

A train would come in from down below us.

It would have box cars

and they would stop underneath the crane,

the crane would take the cane, put it in a trough.

They'd wash the cane, bring it in to the mill,

crush it and then from then make sugar.

The working day was brutal.

The day here at Laurel valley was one that started

at around 7:30 and ended close to 8:00.

It wasn't an uncommon thing to have people

ploughing in the fields at night.

As far as the working conditions they were hard,

the average life expectancy was around 25 years of age.

This is slave labour in some very difficult conditions

down here in the swamps with mosquitoes and malaria

and the blazing sun,

so there was no easy place to be a slave

but this was probably one of the worst places.

Workers started at very young age.

About eight, nine, ten.

Life as a slave was so harsh

that some couldn't bear to bring a child into the world.

You have infamous stories of mothers

deciding to commit infanticide

rather than subject a child to slavery.

The deserted structures at Laurel valley hint

at the cruelties of day to day life.

Imagine living in these swamps in one of these primitive houses,

no screens on the windows to keep out the mosquitoes,

there were probably, you know, five people to a room.

Very, very primitive and difficult conditions.

But a violent series of events would soon change america,

the tuckers and the people they had enslaved.

The southerners,

they saw slavery as the bedrock of their economy

and, you know, it's sort of an economic nonsense

in a way because it's been proven

over and over that slavery

was an inefficient way to run anything.

And yet slavery had become so entwined with southern culture.

Few families felt more strongly about this than the tuckers.

In 1861 the civil war broke out and in 1863,

Caleb Tucker left Laurel valley

and went off to join the confederate army.

For a man like Caleb Tucker

who has considerable slave holdings,

the notion of emancipating his enslaved labour force

is akin to bankrupting himself.

After the union won the war,

Tucker's confederate background was to have a catastrophic effect

on his plantation.

Local union authorities exacted real retribution on him.

We know for a fact that union authorities,

you know, plundered the plantation,

so as a result the plantation

in the latter stages of the civil war

really falls upon hard times.

Eventually the tuckers sold the plantation

and the Laurel valley slaves were set free.

But any hopes of a better life soon vanished.

The period just after the civil war

is really heartbreaking,

because there was such an opportunity

to give these former slaves some semblance of their rights.

They were on their way to something

that looked like at least a somewhat freer society

and somewhat more opportunity.

But this period of reconstruction didn't last very long.

Racial hatred and low wages meant that the working conditions

for the Laurel valley slaves in Louisiana hardly improved.

In 1887, they staged a mass strike

and an all-white militia was sent to crush it.

They not only tried to kill strikers,

they also end up massacring black civilians,

black people who are in the town

and so historians don't have a very strong sense

of exactly how many blacks were killed

but it was dozens,

it was scores of people being murdered,

being slaughtered.

The strikers had little choice but to return to work

in the same sugar fields

and the plantation began to thrive again.

A boom between 1890 and 1924

saw more building and development.

They had huge cranes

for loading the cane and loading the product.

They had miles of railroad tracks,

they had to move around a lot of material

and they were willing to invest a lot in the infrastructure

to make that happen.

But the great depression

of the 1930s bought economic disaster

to the sugar industry and southern Louisiana.

Eventually the worker's cabins became empty

and the sugar mill closed for good.

Today Laurel valley still stands.

The fields are still used to grow sugar cane

but the slave houses now lie deserted.

This particular site is a window

into a part of our history,

a part of world history

and as tragic as it is

it's also really important to recognise it.

It's a story that needs to be told.

Perched on a remote coastline in the Scottish highlands

is a collection of buildings that keep silent watch over the sea.

Up on the cliffs you're swept away by the natural beauty.

But if you look down at your feet, you'll find concrete foundations.

Man's been here

and he's created things and then taken them away.

But that's not the only mystery in these far away foothills.

Concealed in dense grassland

is a fascinating doorway to the past.

If you don't know what you're looking for,

you are never gonna find it in this landscape.

You could just about make out big steel doors

that appear to lead right into the mountainside.

Never in your wildest dreams could you imagine what lies beyond.

Whatever is there is too secret to appear on local maps.

It's what you don't see that's even more impressive

about this complex.

Secrecy was very, very key to the entire operation.

What's there is enormous.

It's when you make a noise that you realise

the scale of this place.

They represent six cathedrals buried in the Scottish land.

Why go out of your way to hide this huge facility?

And what is its connection to the clifftop ruins?

The link between the gateway in the woods

and the clifftop structures begins two miles away

with some vast metal drums in the town of invergordon.

You're looking at a kind of industrial complex

and it's a very, very important site.

You suddenly realise

there are these massive round structures,

heading off as far as the eye can see.

Rows and rows of these rusting circular domes

stretch out in to the distance.

Military archaeologist Allan kilpatrick

has made extensive studies of the area.

The site is very impressive,

this engineering and the quality of its engineering

is absolutely first rate.

It all dates back to the early 20th century.

Built initially in 1913,

the fact that they're still here today

having had no maintenance

for over 25 years or there thereabouts,

still standing in an amazing condition.

Inside these circular domes,

it's almost pitch black and covered

in this almost powdery white substance.

It's quite spooky.

The white powder is organic material

which confirms that these tanks have been empty for years.

But they were once filled

with the 20th century's black gold, oil.

The largest of these enormous steel tanks

is almost 120ft high and 45ft wide.

The whole fuel depot once held

hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oil.

You had 44 oil tanks constructed,

each one of these tanks contained 5,000 tonnes of fuel oil.

So, what happened to the oil

and what connects it to the coastal ruins

and the dark secret in the mountainside?

During the first world war

this was a key royal Navy facility.

When you consider

the importance of fuel to the Navy,

it's as important as ammunition or guns.

No fuel, no fleet.

Invergordon sits on the cromarty firth,

a deep island waterway that leads out to the north sea.

Invergordon was really, really important strategically,

that ships could slip in under the cover of darkness,

fuel up and then disappear off.

Thanks to invergordon

the royal Navy was able to make a huge contribution

to the victory over Germany.

But the clifftop structures east of invergordon suggest

that the fuel depot later came under threat.

These are the remains of the north sutre coast battery.

Originally built in 1913,

by the start of the second world war

it had been upgraded to guard against the new threat

to the Navy's precious oil.

All this effort was to try and protect it

from aerial attack

because aerial attack was the major threat

to the royal Navy.

When Germany invaded Norway in 1941,

it gained control of a coastline

that was within striking distance of Scotland.

In February 1941,

a junkers 88 came tearing in over invergordon.

It carried out a solo attack, dropping two 500-pound bombs.

It collapsed tank 13,

spilling oil down the adjacent railway line

and down in to the firth itself.

Tank 13 was never rebuilt so now it is a gap in the tank farm.

The British had foreseen the dangers

and for the previous four years had been building a place

nearby to store even more fuel.

But there are no signs of the site.

If you didn't know where to locate this entrance,

you wouldn't know this place even existed.

There is a door in the mountainside

made out of incredibly thick steel

and very firmly bolted to the concrete.

Behind this unassuming portal in to this hillside,

lies one of the finest examples of civil engineering.

This is one of two tunnels

that lead into this remote highland hillside,

500ft above invergordon.

It's only by venturing deeper

that the true nature of the complex is revealed.

The access tunnel here is over 220 metres long.

A few metres later

and the tunnel seems to end entirely.

Once you get to the end of that corridor,

you realise there is another way forward

but it's through a much, much smaller pipeline.

The staff would have to lie flat

on this wheeled board

that they'd then be pushed through the pipes.

They would eventually emerge into a monstrous void.

The space which is ahead of me

is vast, is the size,

in fact actually bigger, than a mediaeval cathedral.

The sheer size of this is 780ft long

by 30ft wide by 52ft high.

It really is an impressive piece of engineering.

This is just one of six tanks that make up

the inchindown underground fuel depot.

The first was completed in 1941

and each one held 5.6 million gallons of fuel.

At more than 400ft below ground,

no German bomb could touch it.

A system of pumps and piping

carried the fuel down to invergordon.

The fuel flowed down four miles of pipes,

from the tanks down to the naval base.

600 men were involved.

Massive amount of tunnelling,

a quarter of a million cubic metres

of sandstone removed from this facility.

This impressive feat of engineering

would soon play a critical role

in the largest seaborne invasion in history.

In world war ii,

this one facility can support

the fleet for a considerable time.

And without bases like this you have no royal Navy.

In 1944, many of the vessels heading south

towards the beaches of normandy for the d-day landings

refuelled here at invergordon.

It was a crucial part of the naval infrastructure.

And it was critical to the final allied victory

in the second world war.

After the war, the world-class engineering

of the inchindown oil tanks

saw them continue to play an important military role.

This facility was all through the cold war,

a very, very important and very secure site

for your fuel storage for logistics for the Navy.

There were plans to upgrade the site

for use by NATO

but these plans were later abandoned

and in 2002 the site was officially closed.

That is an incredible journey and an amazing life span

for something that was first constructed in 1941.

The vast inchindown oil tanks

continue to break records to this very day,

including what's believed to be

the longest lasting reverberation ever recorded.

It measured about 117 seconds of reverberance

before the sound finally tailed to nothing.

In the south of Jamaica at the mouth of Kingston harbour,

a windswept Caribbean village hides a turbulent past.

It's a thin peninsula stretching out into the sea.

You can see from the way the wind whips the trees

that this is an exposed area.

A long building stretches along the coastline.

The plaster is peeling off the walls

and it's been battered by the elements.

Scattered clues suggest a military connection.

You've got imposing walls

and there's a tower with some arches.

There's a huge courtyard

with strange wooden shapes in the floor.

Turn a corner and there's a line of cannons

in various states of disrepair.

Some rusting,

some looking as though they're ready to fire.

Further exploration reveals that something went seriously wrong.

You can see that the whole building

has been upended on one side, but remains perfectly intact.

What force could have moved the entire structure?

The way the harbour walls are crumbling into the sea

and the whole place being so quiet,

there's a real sense that something happened here

that we're not getting the full picture,

that there's something under the water.

How did the relics of manmade structures

end up beneath the waves?

What was this mysterious settlement?

An incongruous red brick fort overshadows the sleepy harbour,

hinting that the focus here has not always been on fishing.

This is a military space but what period it is from

and what they are protecting is not immediately apparent.

What was so worth defending on the far-flung Jamaican coast?

This point is right in the middle

of the Caribbean's busiest trading routes

of the 17th century.

This meant money, and money always needs defending.

This is port royal.

400 years ago,

this forgotten backwater was the Jewel of the Caribbean.

Local archaeologist dorrick grey

explains how the English snatched it from Spanish hands.

When the English captured Jamaica in 1655,

one of the first things they started to do

was to build a fort.

All it was, was a stockade with wood

that the soldiers were to defend the island.

And what is left of it is that semi-circular you see there.

This was the first English structure in Jamaica that was built.

The fort rapidly expanded

and so did the town and port royal soon became

one of the most important cities in the world.

When it was built this town was bigger than Boston

and had more money than all of London.

But this prize so far from home wasn't easy

for the English to protect.

They then did something incredibly risky and unusual.

They sent an open invitation to the most lawless

and ruthless criminals on the planet

to come and make it their home, pirates.

The second half of the 17th century

was the golden age for pirates

with as many as 5,000 at large on the oceans.

Port royal became their capital.

Were the abandoned structures that litter port royal home

to these buccaneers?

Now just imagine these were rowdy persons

and there were pirates operating on behalf of the English.

It seems like a crazy idea

but it was a better the devil you know move.

By getting these libertarians on their side,

the British were asking them to attack the Spanish ships,

thereby protecting their own trade and diminishing their enemies.

Port royal flourished under pirate rule,

eventually growing into an outlaw town

of some 8,000 people.

The Caribbean was like the wild west of the 17th century.

And port royal was like dodge city.

It was said that one in four buildings

in port royal was a bar or a brothel.

This city was known around the world

as the 'wicked' city.

Clues about the city's fate lie beneath the waves.

There was something far more menacing

on the horizon

that neither the British

nor their pirate army could have foreseen.

The remains of abandoned streets have been found

in the murky waters that surround the pirate city

of port royal in the Caribbean.

And the holes in the centuries-old wall

show where most of it disappeared.

If you look you see three spaces

in the wall right here.

This, the largest one,

is where we have lime street.

Lime street was one of the most important streets

in port royal.

Why did port royal vanish below the waves?

A curious building tilting precariously

in to Jamaica's soft Sandy rock

is proof of port royal's unstable geology.

The building went more than 15 degrees

into the ground.

So, they call it giddy house because when you go inside

you are tilting to one side.

The Caribbean archipelago is a geologically active area.

Jamaica sits exactly where the Caribbean plate

and gonave microplate meet,

but they meet side by side in what's called a transform fault

and this fault rubs against each other

as things move

and that can cause violent juddering and earthquakes,

but also some of those earthquakes

can be quite shallow

and cause violent changes on the earth's surface.

So, on 7 June, 1692, there was a devastating earthquake.

13 acres of land sank in to the sea immediately.

These heavy buildings suddenly found themselves

not on solid sort of Sandy substrate,

but on a liquid Sandy substrate.

What was solid land all of a sudden becomes liquid

and things sink into it.

And as the earthquake stopped,

then the sand essentially re-solidified itself

trapping the buildings within it and even people.

2,000 people were killed almost instantly,

another 3,000 died later from disease.

But that was just the beginning.

The earthquake being coastal,

also created a Tsunami

and it's reported that the sea moved about a mile away from the land

before then coming crashing in with violent waves

that attack the city from the seaward side.

This is fort James

and this was one of a number of forts

that sank.

Fort James is about 25, 30 feet underwater now.

So, all of that area from the old naval, coming out,

was once land.

A letter from a survivor said,

"we ran out of the house,

"where we saw all people with hands lifted up,

"begging god's assistance."

The city can no longer function, it was over.

Many believed this was retribution.

All of the debauchery and sin

wiped off the earth by god's wrath.

More than 1,000 acres of port royal were destroyed.

The pirate capital never returned to its riotous heyday.

But it was reborn a century later.

One of britain's most celebrated naval officers

was called in to service here.

In 1779, Horatio Nelson was put in charge of 500 men

at fort Charles.

Admiral lord Nelson

did all he could to prevent port royal

disappearing back in to the sea.

This naval hospital was ingeniously designed

with large parts of the building pre-assembled in britain

before being shipped out to Jamaica.

The building itself is built, it's on a raft foundation,

which means all of the columns you see are tied to each other.

And it's like the building itself is afloat.

And this is why for example,

it has been able to withstand more than 17 major hurricanes.

In 1907, there was another earthquake.

This earthquake was really the sort of final nail

in the coffin

and after this most people fled the town.

Mother nature had finally claimed the once infamous pirate city,

consigning its nefarious secrets

to the depths of Davy Jones's locker.

Marine excavation takes time and Patience

and although there's been a few digs over the years,

there's huge swathes of the city

that have yet to be explored

so who knows what treasures still lie hidden beneath.

Now they lie abandoned,

but once they were at the cutting edge

of engineering.

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war,

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV