Original subtitles

Narrator: A ruined compound on the edge of a peninsula

which was home to a brutal leader.

It clearly took a huge amount of money

to build this place so why did they leave?

What happened here?

Why is it so badly damaged?

Alien looking structures with no apparent purpose.

They sit isolated and marooned on this piece of abandoned marshland

and they feel otherworldly.

Damaged buildings in a barren landscape

with a toxic past.

It looks like some sort of mad Max hellscape

or they've poisoned the soil

and left nothing but destruction and ruin behind.

And cottages concealing an explosive secret.

Underneath these charming destroyed houses

is clearly something a bit sinister.

Some are engineering marvels now abandoned,

others are ruins shrouded in mystery.

But within each of these decaying structures

are the echoes of history.

While some are associated with dark times

they are all reminders of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunting shell is now ready to be unmasked

to tell it's own unique story.

In the rolling hills of guatape in Columbia

beside a shimmering turquoise lake

is a battered ruin that looks completely out of place.

On the shores of this enormous lake stands the ruins of something,

it's not really clear what.

It looks forgotten and in places it's badly damaged

yet it clearly bears the hallmarks of a luxury resort.

Translation: "Many people who come and visit this mansion

"feel all sorts of strange things."

A collection of buildings in various states of disrepair

sprawl across 20 acres of this dramatic looking peninsula.

Throughout the entire complex,

there's a funny combination of things,

towers that look like they might be guard towers

and maybe it's an ornamental feature,

it looks a little bit like a cross between a playboy mansion

and some kind of military fort.

Vegetation consumes much of the structure now,

going through the roof and the crumbling facade.

As you get closer you can see some odd details,

the walls are very thick or hollow in some places,

there's signs of some kind of enormous explosion

so this place clearly has a story to tell.

Who lived here?

What caused this destruction

and why did this become

one of the most dangerous places on earth?

In 1983 hundreds of labourers each with a specific job

started work on this extraordinary complex,

no expense was spared.

It had a swimming pool, tennis courts, a football pitch,

none of which sound

out of the ordinary.

But that football pitch doubled up

as a helipad and it also had

it's own private seaplane dock,

this place was anything but ordinary.

William jimenez is a local resident

and was employed here as a security guard.

Translation: "It took almost seven years to build the structures

"that you can see here today."

Throughout the long years of construction,

the surrounding area also went through a period

of remarkable transformation

but it was not changed for the better.

Just 25 miles away is the town of medellin

by the mid 1980s it was being referred to

as the murder capital of the world.

It was home to the infamous medellin drug cartel

which at it's height was raking in

up to $60 million a day in drug profits.

It's founding father was the notorious Pablo Escobar.

Born in rionegro, Columbia in 1949

Escobar is believed to have been the wealthiest criminal in history.

By the early 1990s, he amassed a fortune

estimated at 30 billion us dollars

making him one of the richest men in the world at the time.

A career that began by selling contraband cigarettes

and fake lottery tickets

eventually saw him running a full blown crime empire

involving kidnap, smuggling and murder.

When you're Pablo Escobar, you can never really relax,

he was always surrounded by security.

He had armed guards,

he had walls that were built like the walls of a fortress.

Escobar wanted to be ready for anything.

Needing a safe retreat for his family,

Escobar built this hacienda la manuela.

It was named after his own daughter

and it was built purely for the enjoyment of his family.

Translation: "His family used to stay here occasionally,

"his mother, his wife and his children,

"it was an ordinary thing, it was not a hiding place."

This was one of a string of palatial properties

enjoyed by Escobar's family.

One located nearby including a bull fighting arena and a zoo.

Hacienda la manuela though less extravagant

had secret compartments,

hiding places and a maze of corridors.

Not to mention helicopters and speed boats

ready to provide a rapid getaway across the surrounding waters.

For all it's luxury, security was the first priority.

Pablo Escobar had this family retreat

protected by a 120 strong security staff.

It was basically a small army.

Imagine the paradox of this place,

Escobar wanted it to be a lovely family retreat,

swimming pool for the kids,

meanwhile he's got shipments of drugs and cash moving through,

he's got the place surrounded by armed guards

and seaplanes and speedboats coming in and out.

It can't have been the most relaxing spot in the world.

Pablo himself made only brief appearances here.

Translation: "Pablo was here two or three times maximum

"but he used to spend only a few hours here and leave.

"He wouldn't even stay overnight."

When you're the 7th richest man in the world

you've got to watch your back at all times.

By the early 1990s,

Escobar was embroiled in an all out war

with the columbian government.

After a brief stint in prison he escaped in 1992

and was to spend the rest of his life on the run.

With at least 80% of the us cocaine market

supplied by his medellin cartel, Escobar was now a target

not only for the columbian authorities

and the us government but also for rival drug cartels.

The staff at this mansion including security guard, William jimenez,

were soon being drawn in to the turf war.

In 1993, some of Escobar's rivals managed to infiltrate the compound.

Translation: "What happened was that six more pick ups

"and one Van came full of people.

"It was around midnight, they placed two bombs,

"one on that side and one on that side."

They stashed this huge quantity of explosives in a bathroom.

And blew it up.

Translation: "This was where they placed the biggest bomb.

"There was a huge explosion,

"everything you can imagine was shaking.

"In this area there was a bathroom

"and that is where the bomb exploded upwards.

"And destroyed the walls around it.

"It was such a powerful explosion."

The organisation thought to be responsible was los pepes

which stood for 'persecuted by Pablo Escobar'.

It was a vigilante group formed by victims of Escobar's drug war.

CIA documents released in 2008

suggest columbian intelligence officers

were in contact with los pepes.

In fact it was probably funded by his rivals in the Cali cartel

we'll never really know for sure but this bombing

was kind of the beginning of the end for Escobar.

Medellin became a battleground

in Escobar's war of supremacy over rival cartels

and also the columbian and American governments.

Escobar was even offering reward money

to anyone who killed a columbian police officer

so the bombing of the mansion was too good an opportunity

for the police to miss.

Police forces quickly swooped in

and seized all the drugs and money

now exposed by the damage from the explosion.

Though no-one had been killed,

for William and many others who worked here at Escobar's mansion,

the impact was devastating.

Translation: "After the attack, things were really hard

"not because of the mansion itself but because a lot of people,

"I'm talking 200, 300 people from this area lost their jobs,

"that was the hardest part to me."

The net was now closing around the so called king of cocaine.

He corrupted the columbian government

and law enforcement to a large degree,

none the less, they still came after him

and the end wasn't too far away for him.

Leading the manhunt was colonel Hugo Martinez

of Colombia's national police.

He had hunted Escobar for years,

had turned down countless bribes

and his life had been under constant threat,

Martinez eventually managed to pinpoint Escobar's location

using radio triangulation technology.

There was a fierce gun fire fight

which saw Escobar and his bodyguard shot down

as they fled across the rooftops.

He died as one of the most wanted criminals in history

and the damage he did is there for all to see.

Translation: "As it happens, in most wars

"many innocent people die.

"People who have nothing to do with it

"and this has happened in medellin, in Bogota

"and in many other places in Colombia."

So what became of Escobar's properties?

Some have been turned into strange theme parks

while others have been demolished completely

but this ruined mansion remains trapped

in a strange form of limbo.

Translation: "At the moment,

"I'm in a legal dispute with the government

"to have ownership of this mansion,

"I have been looking after it,

"I have maintained and ensured that no-one else would invade it."

Deciding on the proper use for a drug funded property

and the profits from it's sale

is a touchy and legally complicated subject.

To this day Pablo Escobar remains

a hugely divisive figure in Colombia,

there are those who still revere him as this national hero

but for others caught in the cross fire and the violence,

he represents everything wrong with the country.

In the thick forests of wunsdorf on the outskirts of Berlin

are what appear to be buildings typical of this region.

What looks like pretty holiday cottages

that people ought to be vacationing in

have clearly been smashed to pieces.

The closer you look, you can't help but wonder

if these are just residential houses.

The smashed concrete is exceedingly thick

and some places clearly reinforced.

They're entrances to something that is much much bigger,

underneath these charming destroyed houses

is clearly something a bit sinister.

Deeper beneath the tree canopy is an innocuous looking building,

gaining access to it, however, is far from easy.

There's almost a feeling of entering into a secret vault.

Whatever they were doing,

they were clearly trying to disguise and conceal this from the world.

This place has been home

to several of the world's most powerful armies

as director of the site, Werner borchert, reveals.

I think this location is really fascinating

because there is no other place

where the German kaiser lead to Hitler

against the Russians have left their military marks.

In September 1939, it was occupied by the Nazis,

the date has special significance.

This was one of the most important communication centres

for the German army during world war ii

and guess what,

it was finished just in time for Hitler's Poland campaign.

This is maybach one,

the headquarters for the high command of the German armed forces.

And at it's heart is the zeppelin bunker.

The communication facilities

and the command and control facilities in these bunkers

are absolutely the beating heart

at the centre of the Nazi war effort.

It's essentially very close

to what the Pentagon is in Washington.

In the English speaking world, we are really fascinated

with the way that the enigma code was broken.

And the zeppelin bunker underneath Germany

this is where all the messages came from

that we were listening to and breaking at bletchley park.

For obvious reasons, the site needed to be heavily disguised.

Made to look like civilian houses

they were given shingled roofs and plastered walls,

they had fake windows

and the steel armoured doors were covered with wood

so they looked like just ordinary household doors.

The buildings were also low to the ground

and scattered across a large area in thick pine forest.

They are not laid out as you would expect,

this from the air does not look anything

like a military installation.

At the mid point of world ii,

the allies were facing the very real prospect of defeat,

the bunkers became a high priority bombing target.

If you're going to try to bomb this complex,

it actually requires a little more difficult navigation

than it does on a city

where you'd have a very clear radar return,

you would have land marks such as major rivers

that you can use as a reference point for targeting

but you have something on the outskirts

it's harder to find those reference points.

With so few visual reference points,

finding the target presented allied bombers

with a serious challenge.

The task was made harder because from the air,

the complex looked like the homes of innocent civilians

and much of it was buried beneath ground.

A ring of subterranean tunnels connected all 12 house bunkers,

these in turn were linked to the zeppelin bunker

which covered an area of 50,000 square feet

spread across two levels.

It had walls more than ten feet thick

which were encased in an overall protective concrete shell.

Construction workers were supposedly only allowed

to work on site in short stints

to prevent them gaining too much knowledge of it's interior.

It was a stroke of pure luck that finally came to help the allies.

We have records in the us national archives

of interrogations in February of 1944

where a communications people who have been captured

are talking about this bunker in the countryside near Berlin.

Allied intelligence now became even more convinced

of the bunkers significance

but finding and destroying it was quite another matter.

It took the us army air force

the better part of a year

to pin point the location of the German army command bunkers

and they put in a serious raid on it, a big raid.

On 15 march, 1945,

no fewer than 675 us aircraft came swooping in

as part of a major effort to destroy the bunkers.

120 people who died here all civil population.

Because the civil population was not protected

by bunker facilities.

Despite these civilian casualties

the facility was left with barely a scratch,

communications were disrupted for only a few hours.

But by April 1945,

it was the Soviets army on the ground that was closing in on the bunker.

The red army takes advance so rapidly

that the Germans have no time to put together a plan.

Adolf Hitler was shocked to be told that Soviet tanks

were less than an hour from maybach one,

the German army's high command hq was about to be crushed.

It turned out that the Soviets had to pause

to refuel with more diesel so the whole headquarters bugs out

while the Soviets are refuelling their tanks.

Chief of the army staff, general hans cribbs,

asked Hitler for permission to abandoned maybach one

and to destroy all vital machinery and documents.

Hitler reluctantly agreed but the order came too late,

there was no time to destroy anything.

Everything had to be left.

As panicking staff fled,

they were mistakenly attacked by their own planes.

In the afternoon of 20 April, 1945

the tanks of the Soviet 3rd armoured guard

moved in to the compound completely unopposed.

They must have been very surprised at what they found.

And what did they find?

Allegedly four men, only four,

three of which surrendered immediately,

the fourth was too drunk to know what was going on.

Much of the vital equipment was dismantled

and sent to the Soviet union

where Stalin ordered a similar complex built for himself

but according to the terms

of the potsdam agreement of August 1945,

the Soviets were supposed to destroy captured military installations.

They did just that but not entirely.

They blow up a lot of stuff on the surface

but they leave a lot of the tunnels and a lot of the bunkers.

As soon as you go downstairs, you see that the Soviets

were clever enough to leave the guts of this installation in tact.

The Soviets eventually renovated zeppelin

and the tunnel system

to house their own high command of Soviet troops in Germany.

They even upgraded the bunker to be nuclear proof.

This bunker was going to be the command post

for the Soviet destruction of NATO,

this command post was going to be the place

where the commanders

who destroyed Europe in world war III

would sit in order to do it.

Thankfully it was never needed

but the last Russian soldier only left as recently as 1994

after decades of fear and uncertainty

during the cold war years

when world war III seemed like a very real possibility.

Today the ruins of the complex

provide a fascinating window into warfare through the ages.

Make not war again, this is our message here

and that's why we present

the military past here in zossen wunsdorf,

that's the reason, that's our message.

Make not war again.

In the south of Portugal,

just a few miles from the border with Spain

is a place with an other worldly appearance.

It's almost like a scar has been opened up,

you've got the lovely greenery of the ground around it

but in this middle area, in this sort of swath

of deserted and destroyed landscape.

You've got all these interesting colours,

got these black heaps,

you've got yellow bands, you've got this reddish water

and it's quite beautiful in a way but also kind of sinister

because these colours they're not supposed to be here

on the surface of the earth.

Spread across this baron landscape

are gutted buildings, forgotten scraps of old rail tracks

and strange towers about to disintegrate completely.

But the decaying structures themselves

are far from the most alarming sight.

The water itself is dark and eerie

with this kind of red rim around it,

it's all very very stark and a little bit crazy.

The whole area, the buildings, they're damaged, the degradation,

there's a sense that something poisoned them

and it poisoned the land too.

So what created this hellish landscape

and why does it remain this way to this day?

The scorched earth appearance and damaged buildings

are not the only scars left on the land.

Nearby is a small cemetery that holds the clues

as to who was behind all this.

Here we are in the middle of Portugal

and here's this old graveyard

and the names on the graves are all English names.

You don't necessarily think of it now

but back in the 19th century,

Portugal and Spain were really a land of opportunity,

there were riches in the ground there

and the English wanted them.

In the 19th century

an English company leased the land here began mining.

Although they weren't the first to do so

as joao rolha, an officer for the local area explains.

Established in the 1850s

and stretching for miles across the local alentejo landscape,

this is the Sao de mingos mine.

This mine was a massive industrial operation

and in order to run it,

they needed to make huge investments in infrastructure.

This is going to be the first place in Portugal

that has a railway line extended to it,

it's going to be the first place in Portugal that has electricity.

All the way down the valley

you have these various processing centres,

a rail line that would carry the materials from the mine

and ultimately going all the way out to the coast to the port.

The new investment was helping industry

and creating jobs across the region.

But the condition of the land today suggests it wasn't all good news.

This was going to bring Portugal into the modern times

but it's going to come at a terrible cost

and it's legacy is going to be a frightening one.

Clearly there was money to be made here

and a clue to the reasons comes from the strange coloured water

that lingers in pools across the site.

Normally when you're out in the countryside

you see a body of water, it's a very attractive thing

and you want to go for a dip.

You see this pool of black reddish water

clearly something's very wrong with this.

Incredibly just a few years ago, this pool of dark water

somehow caught fire.

What caused the fire remains a mystery

but the colouration helps explain what was being mined here

and why it looks this today.

When I see red colouration like this I immediately think of iron,

water is highly contaminated with a lot of iron oxide in it

but I know that it wasn't iron that they were after

in this particular area.

When the British came in, they were looking for

a variety of valuable things, gold, silver, copper,

these things often tended to travel together in geology.

Ultimately they focused on the copper.

The 19th century was a time of huge change across Europe

and Portugal being left behind.

The Sao de mingos mine

was going to drag the country into the modern age

to join the industrial revolution.

Copper's a very desirable metal, it has lots of good properties,

it's highly conductive and it's got thermal properties

and in the late 1800s, it was being used for wiring,

the advent of electricity and so on,

it was really quite a desirable metal.

But to keep the money rolling in,

the mine would have to constantly adapt.

Later, they focused on the sulphur

which is really just a contaminate in the copper

but in the 20th century they discovered that sulphuric acid

was very valuable in all kinds of industrial processes

like making fertiliser

so they started mining this just for the sulphur.

The crumbling towers and ruins

and what's left of the infrastructure tell their own story.

But it was the extraction and separation

of the metals and chemicals

that had such terrible effects deep in the earth below.

You have to process the rock so they needed a lot of water,

they need to heat and smelt these particular minerals

to essentially remove the copper

from the compounds that they're associated in.

The contaminated water from the processing

had to go somewhere.

And that somewhere was the surrounding land

which became soaked.

While they were pumping out the water,

they were also pumping out all kinds of toxins

and lord only knows what happened to the people

who lived downstream.

The poisoned water was leaving a trail of destruction.

Dark days lay ahead.

When you mix sulphur with water you get sulphuric acid,

battery acid, incredibly dangerous toxic stuff

and this landscape you can see

is polluted with this from top to bottom.

Not only was the ground being poisoned,

toxic gases from the sulphur

also filled the air and the lungs of the workers at the mine.

Eventually the workers are going to really start to feel

the effects of that.

Stuff being pulled out of the crown is going to burn,

their equipment it's going to burn, their clothes,

it's even going to burn their skin.

The health of the workers suffered through the years

but their welfare was hardly a priority

for the mining company

as they found to their cost when the mine closed in 1966.

Both the mine and the people of this area

had simply been abandoned.

Today there is hope

that through an extensive clean up operation,

the land can be rescued and reclaimed

but it's a daunting task.

You know you've heard the term fire and brimstone to describe hell,

well, brimstone is the old fashioned name for sulphur

so when you see a place like this polluted with sulphur,

it really is literally a hellish environment.

On the coast of Kent in southern england

strange formations unexpectedly emerge

from an empty marshland.

You come across these giant concrete structures

looming up out of the ground

like some kind of a concrete satellite dish.

There's something otherworldly and ethereal about them.

They're eerie as if they come from another age.

I first saw these when I was a teenager,

these strange science fiction type objects

miles from anywhere.

Set amongst peaceful lakes,

two saucer like constructions sit alongside a huge curved wall.

99% of people, even the people that live there

probably have very little idea what these things are.

But the simple appearance belies their importance.

These are concrete structures

but they are very sophisticated early 20th century technology.

And it was all driven by world war I.

Long distance artillery fire was a key weapon during world war I.

Microphones were used to try and get a fix

on the location of enemy artillery guns.

Known as gun ranging,

similar technology is used today by us police

to triangulate incidents involving gun fire in major cities.

As the great war progressed,

new innovative sound detection devices

were developed to meet the challenge created by new warfare technology.

But the position of these structures pointing out to sea

clearly show that artillery fire was not the primary concern.

The location of these structures right on the coast

facing overlooking the channel

gives you a clue as to their purpose.

They were built to pick up the sounds

of approaching enemy aircraft.

Even a few minutes of extra warning

before those planes became visible in the sky

could make a massive difference on the ability

to get your planes in the air.

To defend the country and to get your civilians into shelters.

These are the denge sound mirrors.

Situated near the tip of a headland at dungeness,

they lie just 25 miles from the French coast

and continental Europe.

There is no other major source of sound or distraction nearby,

you can focus out at sea on sound.

The simplest way to understand how the mirrors works

is what you do yourself,

you want to hear something you do that.

And that's simply what the mirrors are,

they're a much larger version of that, they concentrate sound,

the sound collector and amplify it.

Designed by gifted physicist, Percy rothwell,

the first giant mirror was constructed in 1928.

Lessons were quickly learnt, a larger 30 foot mirror

built alongside the first one was set at a different angle.

This one is a great deal deeper,

it is a true paraboloid and the deeper you make the mirrors,

the more they concentrate sound.

This gave no advantage in terms of range

but it could track the trajectory of aircraft

with far greater accuracy.

Then in late 1930, they went one step further.

The star of the show was the long mirror,

this was 200 foot long and 26 foot high,

by far and away the largest structure of it's kind

ever created.

It wasn't just a big wall of concrete

that you stood in front of,

it was actually a very sophisticated scientific device.

The curved surfaces concentrate sound waves

that bounce off the walls to once fixed position

focusing the waves on to a microphone.

The results were compared with those from other mirrors

and used to calculate an aircrafts height, speed and flight path.

An operator stationed near the mirrors

used a stethoscope to try and decipher the different noises.

A trickier task than it sounds.

While the sound mirrors look basic or even crude,

actually operating them was an incredibly skilled job.

The operator would have sat about here, he's got a wheel

so he can move the sound collector from side to side,

he's out of the weather and away from any extraneous noise

and can concentrate even better than standing out in the open.

To distinguish between the sounds of different sorts of engines,

some aircraft, some ship and other noise

was incredibly difficult work

and required such focus and intensity

that operators could only work in shifts of 40 minutes.

One of the limitations of the acoustic technology

was of course it collected and amplified all sound.

If there were close up bird noises

that would often be collected instead of the aircraft noise

that they were searching for.

To make the job even hard,

aviation technology was developing at an extraordinary rate.

The new and higher speeds of aircraft

that you're getting by the late 1920s and early 1930s

and you're talking about new callings, less drag,

powerful engines so your speed is virtually doubled.

Zeppelins travelled at about 60 miles an hour

and made a hell of a lot of noise so they were very easy to track

but once you got on further than early 1930s,

you've got aircraft travelling at around 200 miles an hour,

you've got fighters travelling at over 300 miles an hour

and so even if you can get 12, 14, 15 miles warning,

you're only talking about a couple of minutes.

With rise of fascism across Europe during the 1930s,

the threat of another world war was becoming very real.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler was investing heavily

in his new airforce.

The other difficulty was the immense advances

in aeronautical technology under the Nazis.

The speed of aircraft increased very rapidly

which meant that the job of detecting in time

was increasingly difficult.

So you have relatively little warning time

with a sound system but the development of radar

has been coming at a pace and it is ready

to take over just at the time that aircraft are becoming too fast,

this new technology has been developed

to the point that you can emplace it along the British coast

and take over from the sound detection.

Very soon after the development and installation

of the acoustic mirrors, radar as invented in 1935

and that was such a futuristic technology

that it made the sound mirrors instantly obsolete.

They look almost like some kind of ancient monument

and in a way they are monuments,

they're monuments to a defunct technology.

While the sound mirrors were quickly rendered obsolete by radar,

they still had a role to play

and they would prove pivotal during the battle of britain.

The skies over the south east part of britain

were key battle grounds

when the onslaught by the luftwaffe began in 1940.

Having assured Hitler

that his aircraft would be able to bomb britain into surrender,

luftwaffe chief hermann goring launched the campaign

that could perhaps should have won the war for Germany.

The fighter planes of the raf

and the British coordinated ground defences

somehow made sure that it didn't.

You see it wasn't just the technology

that was key in the battle of britain,

it was the organisation that was behind that.

All that radar did

was it gave much greater accuracy and range

to an already existing communication system

that went back to those headquarters hubs

that coordinated the ground and the air defence

that worked so well and kept britain free

and saved the world in 1940.

Today these old devices sit in a protected nature reserve

providing a fascinating glimpse into a bygone era.

Although the mirrors are somewhat inaccessible on these islands

and only opened to the public once or twice a year,

that has a benefit of preserving this little piece of history

which otherwise must surely have perished.

So often after war,

the installations get torn down and carted away,

here they've been preserved as a kind of monument

to the ingenuity that britain bought to defending itself.

Now they lie abandoned

but once they were the cutting edge of engineering,

there are echoes of history within these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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