Welcome to Where to Wander, our selection of the best under-the-radar destinations in 2025. To see more surprising sites around the world that have fewer tourists and more locals, check out all of Atlas Obscura’s favorite places to travel this year.
Between increasingly-tense wars, climate change, and the popularity of Fallout, you might’ve had doomsday and nuclear apocalypse on your mind this year. Anxiety surrounding the end of the world is nothing new. Whether Armageddon, the Second Coming, or nuclear annihilation, people have been foretelling and preparing for humanity’s grand finale across history. When that day arrives, you might as well wait it out in a bunker-turned aquarium, a mine destined to be filled with riches, or a seaside jail cell that withstood a catastrophic volcanic eruption.
On May 7, 1902, Ludger Sylbaris was arrested for fighting on the island of Martinique. He was placed in a tiny, half-underground cell with no windows and a narrow slit in the door facing the sea. The police didn’t realize it, but they had just saved Sylbaris’s life.
The next morning, Mt. Pelée erupted, and a cloud of superheated volcanic gas and dust rolled out of the volcano at hundreds of miles per hour, destroying everything in an eight-mile radius. Anyone unlucky enough to be in its way burned to death. Even those in shelters were suffocated as the wave of gas burned up the oxygen. Nearly all 30,000 residents of the city were killed instantly.
Sylbaris couldn’t have been more lucky. He was found four days after the eruption by a rescue team. Despite being in the safest place on the island, he was still horribly burned as the air in his room had flash heated to over 1,000 degrees. After surviving the volcano, Sylbaris became something of a celebrity and was known as “the man who lived through Doomsday” and “the Most Marvelous Man in the World.”
Some 25 feet beneath an unassuming two-story house, an elaborate underground compound waits to shield its residents in luxury from the ravages of nuclear war. With three bedrooms, four baths, a casita, and a fireplace, a 6,000-square-foot home looks out at trees, flowers, and a fountain.
The sprawling artificial environment features 12-foot ceilings and skies with lighting to simulate day and night, as well as a swimming pool and putting green. If that isn’t enough, there’s also a sauna, dance floor, barbecue grill, billiard room, and seating for more than 120 people. Since this is a fallout shelter, it also includes a generator, fire and smoke alarms, an intercom system, and large food-storage pantries.
The unique home was built in the 1970s by Girard “Jerry” Henderson, who lived in the underground mansion with his wife. He was a majority partner with Underground World Homes, Inc., which promoted subterranean health and safety benefits as well as “the ultimate in true privacy.”
The first series of nuclear tests by the Soviet Union revealed that the depth for a bunker’s silo must be at least 165 feet underground to survive nuclear fallout. So a construction team set out to build a top-secret base beneath the streets of Moscow.
Strategically located inside a hill in the Tagansky district (due to its proximity to the Kremlin), Bunker-42 wasn’t completed until 1956 and was never put into use in its original capacity. Rather, it spent the subsequent three decades as an airstrike command base, communicating with aircraft transporting nuclear weapons until the political climate began to shift in 1986.
Today, the space exists as a museum, providing a glimpse into what life was like on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
Couple Emma and William Andrew Nicholson believed that Armageddon (apocalypse from the Book of Revelations) was coming, so they built their home to withstand whatever forces might come. Construction was completed in 1946, and the building was dubbed the “Millennium Manor Castle.”
The entire structure is made of thick stone surfaces: The exterior walls are more than two-feet thick, the interior walls are at least 19-inches thick, the floors are more than four feet of stone, and the roof weighs in at more than 400 tons. Outside the house is a well that measures some six stories deep. A stone wall encloses the castle and the surrounding land.
Unfortunately, Nicholson never got to see whether the apocalypse arrived as he expected. He passed away in 1965 and he did not leave a will, because he thought he would live for eternity. The new owners remodeled the property, opened it up to the public for tours, and registered it with the National Registry of Historic Places.
This bomb shelter was originally built by Germans around World War II. When the war was over and Czechia (at the time Czechoslovakia) came under Soviet influence, the bunker was taken over by the People’s Army and planned to be a top-secret hideout in case of nuclear war. The underground structure was intended primarily for local-government elites under the communist regime, capable of housing a maximum of 500 people for around three days and nights.
Today, it is open to the public as a retro hotel, and not much has been changed from the original look. Rooms still have the original bunk beds and 50-year-old phones to contact the reception area.
From the outside, the Ocean Fantasy Museum doesn’t look like your typical aquarium. A kitschy mermaid statue lounges under a fountain, and the path to the entrance is covered in a mural of sea life. But the building itself seems small, scarcely more than a foreboding concrete dome over a doorway.
Walk through the entrance—an 11,000-pound lead and steel blast door, meant to withstand nuclear detonations—and you will find a treasure trove of marine life, one tank after another lining the winding, 650-foot path of the former underground bunker.
The bunker was built in 1963 as a military command center and bunker for Chiang Kai-shek, the dictator of the Republic of China in Taiwan until his death in 1975. Since 1992, the bunker has been converted from its original purpose into an aquarium showing everything from remoras to scorpionfish.
Tucked away in a remote section of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, you’ll find the “Kelpius Cave.” Built into the side of a hill with a stone-frame entrance, the cave is believed to be the 17th-century home of America’s first cult of mystics to predict an imminent apocalypse.Although cynics suspect the structure is simply an old springhouse, this area along the banks of Wissahickon Creek was settled in 1694 by mystic and scholar Johannes Kelpius and his followers. Believing, based on an elaborate interpretation of the Book of Revelation, that the world was going to end that year, the group sought a solitary lifestyle in the wilderness of the Wissahik woods while awaiting the End of Days and the Second Coming.
When the end of the world did not come as planned, Kelpius and his followers stayed in the Wissahickon area. The group mostly disbanded after their leader’s death in 1708.
According to believers from across the globe, the village of Bugarach, France, was supposed to be the only location in the world that would be spared during the Maya-predicted apocalypse of 2012. Despite scientists asserting with a high level of confidence that the Mayan calendar simply would start over, the New Age followers who flocked to the town insisted that aliens living beneath the mountain near Bugarach would save them when the world ended.
We now, of course, know the world did not end in 2012, but Bugarach remains a popular site for believers. With a steady stream of visitors per year, alien-scientists and fanatics alike have come to the foot of the mountain, or alien garage as they like to call it, to pray and learn.
As political tensions rise around the world, some doomsday preppers are preparing for the fallout of a nuclear war. None of them, however, are as prepared as Bruce Beach, who created a 10,000-square-foot subterranean shelter out of 42 recycled school buses, topped with layers of concrete and soil, in an attempt to save humanity in the event of Armageddon.
After entering the shelter through a small portal, 500 survivors of a nuclear attack would descend 14 feet below ground to access the matrix of interconnected school buses that make up Ark Two. The underground complex includes dozens of rooms inside the school bus shells, including two kitchens, a radio communications center, a doctor’s office, an exercise area, and even a laundry room.
Ever since Beach died in 2021, the future and leadership of the bunker has become uncertain. It still sits underground in Ontario, however, on standby in the event of doomsday.
In 1886, John Hyrum Koyle—a farmer and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—claimed he was receiving spiritual visions in his dreams. He said an angel told him he would find an injured cow with a horn that had pierced its eye. Koyle claimed to have found such a cow the next day and began preaching his dreams as prophecies from God.
In 1894, he had another prophetic dream in which an angel told him to purchase an abandoned mine in a nearby mountain. He and his followers were instructed to dig new tunnels in search of buried treasure. This wealth would help support the LDS Church during the return of Christ. Beginning in 1909, Koyle and his followers began selling stock in the mine to fund their excavation work.
For decades, Koyle continued to work on the mine. Even Koyle’s death in 1949 didn’t end the project. Excavations continued throughout the 1960s until the tunnels reached bedrock. Although work on the mine has halted, the current company in charge of the Dream Mine is still selling stock in it.
