Ever think about having a holiday in an abandoned theme park?
These days, we may lament the demise of cities and buildings and other structures due to economic and sociopolitical reasons but there has been a greater appreciation for them in past years. All one has to do is to look at the city of Detroit, Michigan as an example. To that end, there’s one forsaken place in China that is garnering its fair share of visitors.
China’s emphatic economic boom gave birth to a number of infrastructure improvements, but it also spawned a few building busts. The country is dotted with ‘ghost towns’ where construction output failed to match consumer interest. Wuhan has had its fair share of this development that has been successful, boasting their own Madame Tussaud’s wax museum for instance. And so, the news regarding Universal Park in Wuhan is something of a surprise to onlookers. The park, located in Hubei province, began to be built in 1996 but saw all construction aborted just three years later. The culprit? Insufficient funds as well as no means towards transportation accessibility. Universal Park contains a varied amount of structures that were outright reproductions of world-renowned places like the Egyptian pyramids and the Hogwarts school from the iconic J.K.Rowling-penned ‘Harry Potter’ series. The entire park has since fallen into disrepair over the past decade.
But now, Universal Park is seeing an unexpected revival of interest. Tourists have been making their way to the site to indulge in the spooky abandoned stretches. Adventurous visitors have begun camping out on the park grounds overnight. Some have made the park a popular destination for picnics, and some have even gotten into the habit of going around and taking selfies with the buildings covered in moss and other vegetation. And in another bizarre twist, there’s even been quite a few wedding parties that have used various spots around Universal Park as a backdrop for their photos. This renewed burst of visitor activity has created a buzz around China, and there are some who hope that this will give Universal Park a continued second chance at being a tourist draw so it can avoid total demolition.
