Inside the abandoned Spanish town once a ‘utopia’ but now a haven for dark tourists

Despite being just an hour-and-a-half’s drive from , this abandoned town really feels a world away from the hustle and bustle of the capital, famed for its incredible architecture and legendary nightlife, which is home to over three million people.

Built to house cotton and tobacco workers in the 1950s, El Alamin – meaning “the world” in Arabic – was meant to be a utopia for its 150 original inhabitants.

Made of just three streets, with 40 houses, a bar, a post office and a church built in the style, its locals did not have to pay to live there and were only required to cover their electricity bills.

The abandoned town was the brainchild of the fourth Marquis de Comillas, Juan Claudio Güell y Churruca, who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Francisco Franco.

However, the farmland was exploited “to the point of exhaustion” and deteriorated. This left the village unable to sustain itself, wrote the travel blog Madrid No Frills.

Over the years, its inhabitants gradually packed up and left. By 2000, the village had been completely abandoned.

Today, its only visitors come in the form of wishing to explore its abandoned buildings and gain a sense of what life was like around 75 years ago.

However, since 2021 visiting El Alamin has become much harder, as visitors now require permission from the owners to walk its eerie streets.

Tamar Shemesh, writing in Madrid No Frills, recounted how on December 18, 1957, the sister of the Marquis married at El Alamin’s church, with the “wealthiest and most prestigious” families in Spain attending.

In recent years, the legends swirling around the town are full of “darker mysteries”, she added.

One such legend seeks to explain the “real” reason the town was abandoned with tales of a shepherd who led his flock to a nearby mountain. By the next morning, the sheep and the shepherd were dead, spreading panic in El Alamin and causing the locals to flee.

Dr Philip Stone, Executive Director at the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, previously told that sites such as El Alamin make some yearn for the past.

He said: “These ghost towns give us a sense of the people coming before us, but also of our own fast-moving world. When we see places that have literally stopped, it can bring a sense of nostalgia.”