Canada has more islands than any other country on earth — and some of the most extraordinary abandoned places in the country are found on them. A Halifax harbour island...
Canada was built by railways — the CPR main line that tied the country together in 1885, the Intercolonial that made Confederation possible, the branch lines that created thousands of...
Canada has more coastline than any other country on earth — and for over a century, lighthouse keepers lived year-round at remote stations on every headland, island and river entrance...
Canada's industrial century produced some of the most architecturally ambitious factory buildings in the British Empire — rubber plants, cotton mills, grain elevator complexes and steel mills that made cities...
Canada built its network of Victorian psychiatric asylums on the Kirkbride Plan — Gothic Revival central towers with bat-wing ward extensions, working farms, therapeutic lakefront grounds and underground tunnel networks...
Canada's military heritage spans three centuries — French and British colonial forts on the St. Lawrence, War of 1812 harbour batteries, WWI and WWII training bases and Cold War radar...
Canada's mining heritage spans three centuries and three oceans — silver rushes in the Kootenay mountains, nickel in the Sudbury Basin, uranium in the northern Shield and copper smelting towns...
Canada's ghost towns are the most poignant category of abandonment in a country shaped by resource extraction and agricultural settlement — company towns built overnight and abandoned in a season,...
Canada's abandoned prisons are among the most architecturally powerful and most historically charged buildings in the country — federal penitentiaries built from the 1830s onward whose limestone cell blocks, solitary...
Canada built some of the most architecturally ambitious hospitals in the British Empire — tuberculosis sanatoriums on lake shores, psychiatric campuses where thousands of patients lived for decades and Indian...
Alberta is Canada's energy province — a landscape shaped by cattle ranching, prairie wheat, Badlands coal and the oil that transformed everything after 1947. Its abandoned places span the full...
Newfoundland is the most dramatically isolated province in Canada — the last to join Confederation in 1949, shaped by 500 years of Atlantic cod fishing and the extraordinary WWII military...
