The Most Liminal Places in the World: 15 Real Metro Stations, Airports and Ghost Towns, One by One

What Liminal Places Around the World Look Like

Liminal spaces are not only a Japanese thing. Metro stations, airport terminals, oversized plazas, towns left without residents: all over the world there are places where people seem to have vanished, places that feel nostalgic and a little eerie.

This article picks 15 overseas places registered on LIMap and introduces them one by one. All of them are real, and the facts here have been checked against official sites, news reports and similar sources. They are ordered as metro stations, airports, architecture and cities, then ghost towns.

Most are stations and facilities still in use; visit at quiet hours to find the stillness you see in photos. Some are on private or restricted land, so read the notes in each section before you go.

1. Kosmonavtlar Station (Tashkent, Uzbekistan)

A station on the Tashkent Metro, opened in 1984. Its name means "cosmonauts" in Uzbek. The platform walls are clad in ceramic tiles that shade from deep blue to pale blue, and round ceramic panels show figures of space and astronomy, from Gagarin and Tereshkova to the astronomer Ulugh Beg.

After a train pulls out, only the blue walls and the portraits remain. It feels like a room underground where the Soviet-era vision of a space-age future has been kept just as it was.

2. Solna Centrum Station (near Stockholm, Sweden)

Stockholm's metro is known for stations that leave the excavated bedrock exposed and paint directly on it. This one, in Solna, opened in 1975: its rough rock ceiling is painted solid red, and a spruce forest runs along the walls. The artists, Anders Åberg and Karl-Olov Björk, took as their theme the environmental damage and rural depopulation debated in Sweden at the time.

Under a red sky and surrounded by a dark forest, the platform looks like a station dropped into the woods at dusk. Arrive at a quiet hour and you may forget you are underground.

3. Toledo Station (Naples, Italy)

A station on Line 1 of the Naples Metro, opened in 2012 and designed by the Spanish architect Óscar Tusquets. A conical void runs from street level deep underground, lined with blue mosaic, with a light work by Robert Wilson built into it that slowly shifts in color.

Riding the long escalators down through the blue feels like sinking into water. It is often called one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world, but in the quiet moments between crowds it is closer to an artificial deep sea.

4. Formosa Boulevard Station, Dome of Light (Kaohsiung, Taiwan)

The transfer station where Kaohsiung Metro's Red and Orange lines meet, opened in 2008. The ceiling of its circular concourse is covered by the Dome of Light, a stained-glass work by the Italian-born glass artist Narcissus Quagliata, about 30 meters across and made of more than 4,500 pieces of glass.

The dome follows four themes, water, earth, light and fire, through birth, death and rebirth. When the flow of transferring passengers thins out, only colored light falls on the round floor, and it feels like standing at the bottom of a giant kaleidoscope.

5. Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, Terminal 1 (France)

The oldest terminal at Charles de Gaulle, opened in 1974. Designed by the architect Paul Andreu, it is a round concrete building whose central atrium is crossed by escalators enclosed in transparent tubes, criss-crossing in midair.

A major renovation was completed by 2023, but the round body and the tubes remain. When few passengers are passing through, it feels like being inside an enormous machine with no visible exit.

6. Madrid-Barajas Airport, Terminal 4 (Spain)

Opened in 2006, the terminal was designed by Richard Rogers Partnership (now RSHP) with the Spanish firm Estudio Lamela and won that year's RIBA Stirling Prize. A wavy bamboo-finished ceiling rests on Y-shaped steel columns.

The columns shift in color like a rainbow from one end of the building to the other. Because the same ceiling and columns repeat on and on, at quiet hours you lose track of how far you have walked.

7. TWA Flight Center (New York, USA)

A former terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. It is known for its thin concrete roof shaped like spreading wings and an interior with almost no straight lines; red-carpeted tube corridors led out to the gates.

Closed in 2001, it came back to life in 2019 as the lobby of the TWA Hotel. Walking its white curved corridors feels like wandering into the future as imagined in the 1960s.

8. Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the "Square Colosseum" (Rome, Italy)

A white rectangular block in EUR, Rome's southern new town. It was built from the late 1930s for the 1942 Rome World's Fair, which never took place because of the war. Each of its four faces carries identical arches, nine across and six high.

Every arch holds a shadow of the same depth, and it is often compared to a de Chirico painting. Since 2015 it has been Fendi's headquarters; the interior opens only during exhibitions, but the exterior can be seen anytime.

9. City of Arts and Sciences (Valencia, Spain)

After the great flood of 1957, the Turia River was diverted around the city. On its old bed, this complex of cultural buildings was built from the 1990s into the 2000s. Most of it is by Santiago Calatrava: an eye-shaped planetarium, a science museum like a skeleton, and an arched promenade, all set in a row along the narrow site.

Between the buildings stretch shallow pools and white paving. It is a busy tourist spot, but in the early morning or evening, when few people are around, it looks like the inside of a scale model of a future city.

10. Ordos Kangbashi New Area (Inner Mongolia, China)

A new district of Ordos, built in the 2000s with a population of a million in mind. Residents were slow to arrive, and from around 2009 it was reported worldwide as a "ghost town," but its population has since grown, and more than 100,000 people now live there.

Around the civic square stand the Ordos Museum, like a lump of metal, a large library and a theater. Everything is huge and new, yet few people cross the vast paving, as if an architect's rendering had simply become real.

11. Tropical Islands (near Berlin, Germany)

South of Berlin stands a hangar originally built to construct giant cargo airships. At 360 meters long and 107 meters high, it is said to be one of the largest column-free indoor spaces in the world. After the airship company went bankrupt, it reopened in 2004 as an indoor tropical resort.

Under the steel frame are a beach, a lagoon and a rainforest, kept at 26°C all year. An artificial paradise that no season or weather can reach, it is like a real-life version of the Poolrooms people talk about online.

12. Consonno (Lombardy, Italy)

North of Milan, on a hill in Brianza, an entrepreneur bought a small village in 1962 and tried to turn it into a town of amusements. A minaret-style tower, a pagoda, a castle-like gate, a hotel and a dance hall went up, but a landslide after heavy rains in the late 1970s blocked the road to the town, and it fell into decline.

Today the exotic tower and colonnades stand among the trees. Only the shape of someone's idea of a fun town remains, with no one there to enjoy it, which is exactly what makes it liminal. Many buildings are dangerous and fenced off on private land, and visiting hours are limited; view it from the permitted areas.

13. Burj Al Babas (Bolu Province, Turkey)

On a hillside in northwestern Turkey, hundreds of little castles with pointed roofs stand in rows. Construction of the villa development began in 2014, but the developer went bankrupt in 2018, leaving 587 half-built houses of the 732 planned.

Every house has the same shape and spacing, so every street shows the same view. It is the shape of a town that no one has ever lived in. The site is fenced and guarded, so do not enter without permission; view it from outside.

14. Kolmanskop (Namibia)

The remains of a German colonial-era mining town in the desert of southern Namibia. Founded after diamonds were found nearby in 1908, it grew prosperous enough to have a hospital and a theater, but when richer deposits were found to the south, people left, and by 1956 it was empty.

Meanwhile the sand of the Namib Desert poured into the houses. Rooms with pale painted walls now have floors of sloping sand, and doorways are half buried. It lies in a restricted area, so a permit is required and visits are made through local tours.

15. Villa Epecuén (Argentina)

Epecuén flourished as a spa and resort town on the shore of a salt lake until 1985, when a dike broke and the lake swallowed it for years. When the water receded in the late 2000s, it revealed building frames bleached white by salt and dead trees still standing.

There are no roofs or furniture, only the outlines of streets and rooms on the ground. The town keeps its shape, but life has been taken out of it. It is also covered in "Liminal Places Under Water."

Before You Visit

Stations, airports and museums are used by many people every day. When taking photos, do not block the way, and avoid capturing other people's faces. Some countries and facilities also have rules about photography.

Ruins and unfinished towns such as Consonno, Burj Al Babas and Kolmanskop are on private land or in restricted areas. Visit by the permitted means, such as during opening hours or on tours, and do not enter buildings without permission. Old structures can collapse.

If You Find One, Put It on the Map

Besides these 15, about 100 overseas places are registered on LIMap. Zoom the map out to the whole world and look for places that catch your eye. Places in Japan are covered in the regional articles.

If you come across a strange place emptied of people on your travels, please add its photo and location to LIMap.