The Ghost City of Pripyat

Pripyat, a city of 49,000 built for Chernobyl's workers, was evacuated about a day and a half after the explosion. Residents were told they would be back in three days. They never returned. Today the city is frozen in 1986 — an amusement park that never opened, textbooks still lying on desks.

The Exclusion Zone covers 1,000 square miles and remains mostly closed to permanent settlement, with the hottest areas near the reactor dangerous for an extremely long time. But the risk is uneven: some evacuated villages are far less contaminated than others, and wildlife has returned in the absence of humans, with wolves and European bison roaming the abandoned streets.