10 Toxic Towns You Still Can’t Live In

Flooding almost all of the village, a horrifying toxic cocktail of heavy metal pollutants seeped into the valley from the late 1970s onwards, including vast quantities of pyrite, which generates highly corrosive sulphuric acid and dissolved iron when exposed to the air, poisoning soil and groundwater for miles around.

Though the clean-up of the valley was one of the pre-conditions outlined in Romania’s Accession Treaty to the European Union, the company that owns the Rosia Poieni mine has done little to detoxify the area and its surroundings.

To this day, the poisonous blood red, orange and turquoise lake makes for a shocking sight and it’s considered one of Europe’s worst ecological disasters.