12 Ghostly Industrial Relics: Factories & Mines Frozen in Their Prime
5. Fordlândia, Brazil
In the 1920s, Henry Ford envisioned a rubber-producing utopia in the Amazon. He built Fordlândia, an American-style town complete with suburban houses, a golf course, and a Ford factory—thousands of miles from Detroit. But the jungle rejected it. Locals resisted the regimented lifestyle, rubber trees succumbed to disease, and the project collapsed. Today, the site is a haunting contradiction with orderly colonial houses overtaken by vines, rusting mills surrounded by silence, and skeletal factories slowly decaying under tropical skies. It’s a cautionary tale of industrial arrogance—a dream of control, undone by nature’s quiet insistence on chaos.
