From an empty airport used as a go-karting track, to man-made islands that are sinking back into the sea. And from two fully functional nuclear power plants that were never switched on to the largest abandoned amusement park in the world. This is part 4 of our most useless megaprojects series — and believe it or not, it’s the craziest one so far.
Let’s start with Number 7: The Mirabel Airport Imagine an airport with enough space to accommodate 50 million passengers per year. That's what the massive Mirabel Airport, in Montreal, Canada, is capable of. In other words, the entire Canadian population could fly out from Mirabel in a single year, and there'd still be room to spare.
But despite all that, not a single passenger has flown from Mirabel since 2004. To understand how this happened we need to jump back to the 1970s. In those days, Montreal was the gateway to Canada — anyone flying to the country from Europe would land at an airport called Dorval.
And as Canada became more and more popular, the number of trips to this airport increased every year. Eventually, the Canadian government started to worry that it couldn't keep up with all the extra passengers. They needed a new airport.
They needed a bigger airport. And that's why they decided to build Mirabel — a colossal project that could replace Dorval as the country's international hub. This ambitious project took five years to build, and cost a grand total of 500 million Canadian dollars — that’s a couple of billion in today’s money.
It opened at the end of 1975, and was met with a wave of excitement. In terms of area, it was literally the largest airport on the planet. But there was one minor problem… The Mirabel airport had terrible transport links, which meant it was a massive pain to get to.
A high-speed rail was meant to be built between Mirabel and Montreal, but that project collapsed when the government ran out of funding. In the end, the only way to get to Mirabel was via shuttle bus. These buses were slow and unreliable, and as you can probably imagine, the passengers were not impressed.
So, they started to fly to Toronto instead, where the airport had much better transport links. Toronto quickly became the new gateway to Canada, and Mirabel was left behind with the airlines canceling their flights to the giant airport. It was too badly connected to be worth anybody's time.
Nowadays, Mirabel still doesn’t have any passenger flights. It's only really used for cargo flights, and to host a couple of motorsport venues, like an amateur go-karting track. It’s better than nothing, and it does mean this airport isn't completely useless.
Unlike the next megaproject on this list… Number 6: Wonderland Eurasia In 2019, an amusement park opened its gates to visitors. Not just any amusement park: this Turkish project was the biggest amusement park in the whole of Europe, with 800 million dollars worth of rides, restaurants, and giant fiberglass dinosaurs. Wonderland Eurasia, as this park was called, had seventeen roller coasters.
Only two other parks in the entire world — Canada's Wonderland, and Six Flags Magic Mountain — had more. Not to mention the second biggest fountain in the world, which could fire water more than a hundred meters in the air. Wonderland Eurasia was something to get excited about.
At least. . .
that’s what the developers thought. Turkish authorities expected the park to attract approximately 5 million visitors per year. But the park was nowhere near as popular as that.
The rides turned out to be pretty low quality, and a few of them had to be closed. Visitors started leaving bad reviews, and weren’t interested in going again. The park soon started losing money, as the upkeep cost of the giant project was miles higher than the ticket sales.
In the end, the entire place was abandoned, less than a year after it opened its gates to visitors. Now, the park looks like an apocalyptic wasteland, the rides torn apart by weather, vandals, and thieves. In 2022, locals voted that Wonderland Eurasia should be turned into a green space, like a woodland or a park.
Anyways, let's continue with Number 5: Eko Atlantic This next megaproject on the list is an entire city — Eko Atlantic, in Nigeria. Not just any city either. See that land it’s built on?
It’s completely artificial. For millions of years, the Atlantic Ocean has been eating away at the coast of Nigeria, slowly washing away the beaches. In 2003, the Nigerian government decided to fight back, by reclaiming some of that sand from the ocean, and using it to build a new, artificial peninsula.
Eko Atlantic would be built on top: a luxury city with towering skyscrapers, and enough homes for almost a quarter of a million people. It's the opposite of Atlantis: instead of a city sinking into the Atlantic Ocean, this one would rise from the waves. Over the last few years, the Nigerian government managed the hard part: there's now a sandy peninsula sitting in place, protected from the sea by an impressive seawall that people like to call the Great Wall of Lagos.
This seawall makes sure that the peninsula won't get washed away, even at the hands of storms. Overall, this is quite an impressive achievement. But having said that, building these artificial islands is also very controversial.
By blocking the natural flow of the ocean, the landmass has disturbed many local species — and it has affected humans too. In 2012, the Atlantic Ocean swelled up the beach of a nearby island, killing several people. It’s hard to know what exactly caused this, but experts have linked it to Eko Atlantic’s disruption of local currents.
As well as all this, the construction of the city on top of the landmass hasn't gone well at all. Right now, the peninsula is virtually empty, apart from an odd little cluster of residential towers that were finished in 2016. Believe it or not, some people have moved in, but their lives must be pretty bizarre.
Looking out their window, all they can see is a stretch of sand, and dusty roads that trace the outline of non-existent streets. And this was definitely not the plan. The Nigerian government originally wanted this ambitious project to be finished by now.
But although it's massively delayed, they have not given up yet — work is still being done on the island, and slowly but surely, other buildings are popping up. So, maybe, they’ll still manage to pull this off. As it stands today, Eko Atltantic is pretty useless – an artificial landmass with nothing to put on top of it.
And Nigeria isn’t the only country to make this mistake. We'll be seeing an even more useless example of an artificial landmass later. But first, let's talk about… Number 4: The Millennium Dome If you look at a satellite image of London, one of the buildings that immediately sticks out is a vast, white tent at the tip of the Greenwich peninsula.
Nowadays, it's called the O2 arena, and it's one of the most popular venues in the world. But it wasn't always that way. A few years ago, this giant structure was a very different place.
Towards the end of the 1990s, the British government made plans to throw a groundbreaking event called the Millennium Experience — a massive collection of exhibitions and shows that would celebrate the start of the new millennium, and run for the duration of one whole year: from New Year's Eve in 1999, to New Year's Eve 2000. A decision was made to host the event under a giant dome. It would be built on the Greenwich Meridian Line, with twelve support towers that were meant to represent the twelve hours in a day, twelve months in a year, and twelve constellations in the sky.
These support towers held up a net of steel cables, which in turn held up a canopy of polymer fabric. It was all very impressive. But everyone was wondering the exact same thing.
When the year 2000 came to an end, and the Millennium Experience was packed away, what would happen to the dome? As it turned out, the British government didn't have an answer. They thought of selling the dome to a local sports team, but they couldn't find anyone suitable.
They thought of moving the dome to a different city, but the cost was way too much. The dome just sat there, with maintenance costs of a massive 1 million pounds per month. The media began to complain about the massive waste of taxpayer’s money.
In the end, a private company — Meridian Delta — came forward to buy the structure. But still, nothing really changed. The dome just carried on sitting there.
2002 came around… then 2003, 4, 5, 6… But in 2007, something miraculous happened. The Millennium Dome reopened its doors. It had been transformed into a sports and entertainment venue, with bars, restaurants, and a central stage with 20,000 seats.
The O2 Arena, as it was officially renamed, has been doing well ever since. In other words, this megaproject is no longer useless. Maybe that can give hope to all the others from this series.
Number 3: The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant In 1973, the Philippines decided to build a nuclear power plant. They weren't the only ones. This was a decade before the Chernobyl disaster, and without fully understanding the possible dangers, plenty of countries were experimenting with nuclear energy.
The Bataan project was meant to transform the Philippines' economy. And it definitely did that. .
. but not in the way they wanted. In 1976, construction on the plant began.
Although the process was quite slow, for the first few years, it seemed to be going well. At least, it did until someone had the brilliant idea to run some health and safety checks. Why didn’t they run these checks sooner?
Who knows. But better late than never. As it turned out, there were more than 4000 problems with the construction so far, and some of these were pretty major.
There was a faultline nearby, which meant the site was at risk of earthquakes. Again, it’s crazy that nobody thought to check this sooner… but we haven’t even got to the worst part. There was a volcano right around the corner from the Bataan power plant.
Who in their right mind would build a nuclear power plant at the foot of a giant volcano? They should have abandoned the project there and then. But they'd already spent so much money on it, so the government decided to push forward.
They fixed as many of the 4000 issues as they could, while the cost of the project skyrocketed. By the time it was finished, in 1984, the construction had cost a grand total of 2 billion US dollars. But before they could turn the power plant on, Chernobyl happened.
The world realized how dangerous a faulty nuclear power plant could be, and the government in the Philippines was faced with a difficult decision. Their power plant was finished, and ready to go — but was it really worth the risk? Eventually, they decided that turning it on was a bad idea.
So, finally, they decided to cancel the project. The government thought about converting Bataan into a different type of power plant, like coal or oil. But as it turned out, it would have cost more money to convert Bataan than it would to build these other power plants from scratch.
In the end, the structure was just left to sit there, gathering dust — a completely pointless 2 billion dollar project. It's a lot of money to throw away, especially for a country like the Philippines. They were paying back the debt for thirty years — money that they spent for nothing.
But from a health and safety perspective, it was the right decision. Remember that volcano we mentioned? It erupted in 1991.
This isn’t the only time that a nuclear power plant has been abandoned before getting activated. Around the same time, Austria built the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant. After finishing, they held a referendum to see whether or not the plant should be turned on.
The public voted to shut the project down, so… that’s what Austria did. It makes you wonder. Would it not have been easier to hold the referendum before building the project, instead of waiting until the work was finished?
Number 2: The New South China Mall In 2005, the city of Dongguan, in the south of China, spent more than a billion dollars on the largest shopping mall on Earth. This giant mall had enough space for hundreds of thousands of visitors, and more than 2000 stores. But three years after opening, in 2008, more than 99% of the retail space was empty.
The mall had invited hundreds of brands to set up stores there, but none of them wanted anything to do with the project. There were a few fast food chains near the entrance, but apart from that, the place was completely deserted. It all came down to economics.
As a city, Dongguan was relatively poor, which meant there wasn’t much demand for clothing, jewelry, and electronics — basically, the kind of high-end stores that you’d find in a mall like this one. Retailers were well aware of that, which is why they stayed away. What was the point in setting up a store in the South China Mall, when there wouldn't be enough money-spending customers to make it worth their time?
The place became known as a ghost mall. An echoing, empty space. It was the largest mall in the world, but also the most useless.
This lasted for more than a decade. But in 2019, something happened. The mall was rebranded for lower-income customers, with cheap experiences like food stalls and night markets to help bring people in.
In other words, it was now a much better fit for the local community. Just like that, the mall began to gain in popularity, and sensing the excitement, retailers finally started moving in. Today, more than 90% of the space is occupied, and the former ghost mall has turned itself into a busy, bustling space.
It's a similar story to the Millennium Dome — But what about our final megaproject? Number 1: The World Islands We've already talked about Nigeria's attempts to build an artificial landmass. And Nigeria isn’t the only country who’s tried it.
You're probably aware of the Palm Jumeirah, an archipelago of artificial islands off the coast of Dubai. But you might not know about another set of islands just a couple of kilometers down the coast. Take a look at the World.
Or, rather, a miniature version of the world. That's what Dubai has been working on since way back in 2003. It's a pretty amazing project.
Seven sets of islands to represent the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America, Antarctica, and Oceania. Each island represents a country or landmark, like France, New York, or Mount Everest. All of them were built by construction workers, dragging up sand from the ocean floor, then arranging it into piles.
There's also a giant wave breaker around the edge. In total, these islands took several years, and billions of dollars, to finish. But building these islands was only the start.
As soon as they were finished, Dubai began to sell them off for millions of dollars, inviting people to transform each island into anything they wanted. Most of the islands were sold in the first few months to companies, or to wealthy individuals. Plans were made to turn North America and Europe into luxury resorts, to build a hotel on Shanghai, to open a wellness center in Siberia, and even a pub in Ireland.
But none of these plans have happened yet. As things stand, the World's islands are mostly deserted — just empty piles of sand. There's a beach club on the island of Lebanon, a shopping centre in North America, and some construction work going on Antarctica and Europe.
But apart from that, there's really not much to see. A lot of it comes down to infrastructure. When these islands were first built, there were plans to link them together with underwater cables and pipes.
These were meant to provide water and electricity to each island, as well as pulling away any waste. But putting together this network of cables was a lot harder than expected. Developers on each island have had to rely on diesel generators to make electricity, and ship in water every morning.
There was also meant to be a road connecting the World to the mainland, but that hasn't happened either. Overall, it makes it hard to build on these islands, which is why so many expensive plans have never even started. en the islands have been washed away.
And this isn’t the only failed island project in Dubai. In 2005, they built four more giant artificial islands — then they ran out of money, put the project on hold, and a quarter of the sand was washed away again. They started working on these islands again at some point in 2022, but only time will tell whether this project actually goes anywhere.
They also built another palm-shaped archipelago — the Palm Jebel Ali — up the coast from the Palm Jumeirah. Those artificial islands are technically finished, but again, there’s nothing on them. That project has been on hold for years, and doesn’t show any signs of starting up again soon.
Just be glad you didn't buy any of these islands, like those people who invested in the World. But here’s a question: if you did buy an artificial island, what would you want to build on it? Let us know in the comments below.
And if you want to hear about some other useless megaprojects, check out this next video. Thank you for watching, and we will see you again next time.
