Original subtitles

Narrator: Coastal structures in Latvia

that witnessed a forgotten battle.

They're so shattered and splintered it appears almost as if

some vast explosive force has taken them all out

in a chain reaction.

A chilling site that hides a dark world war ii secret.

I'm instantly seeing experiments,

I'm seeing torture and I'm seeing horror.

A town in a scorching desert that suffered an extraordinary fate.

Something happened here

that thoroughly dismantled these structures

and washed away evidence of human habitation.

And an epic construction project

in the mountains of Southern Africa that unearthed a deadly material.

The thing that made it such an amazing material

also turned it into a killer.

Decaying relics,

ruins of lost worlds,

forged by years of toil but now haunted by the past.

Their amazing secrets are now waiting to be revealed.

In a picturesque town north of Berlin, Germany,

lie the charred remains

of a place with a deeply troubling past.

It's hard to discern what it is,

it's a big kind of hangar-like structure.

It looks like it was for the production

of something important.

It's all very secure, it's gated and cut off...

You're wondering why.

It's something that's trying to be discreet,

it's on the outside of the town and hidden by tall trees,

whatever it is it's cloaked in secrecy.

The clues that reveal the dark history of the site

are to be found on the inside.

As you come indoors, you see these big halls and spaces

and you've got these massive ovens.

Clearly, there was intense heat,

certainly there's evidence of a fire having taken place

because of the scorch marks on the walls and ceiling.

When I see old soulless German engineering

rusting away with bricks

that have got gas piping in them and taps,

and I think the most horrible things about what might have happened here.

But what you'd think about this place

isn't what happened here.

It's a little bit of a different story.

So what did happen here?

And why is the building still standing today?

The key that unlocks the secret lies less than two miles away -

at sachsenhausen concentration camp.

It was built by the Nazis

during the years leading up to world war ii.

At the beginning of 1937

there were just 21 Jewish prisoners in sachsenhausen.

By 1945 that number had risen to more than 11,000.

After the kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 alone,

6,000 Jews who had been arrested on the orders of Heinrich himmler

were sent to sachsenhausen.

The Nazi camp system was expanded rapidly

after the beginning of world war ii,

as the regime realised it would need forced labour

to maintain war production.

Sachsenhausen is placed on the outskirts of Berlin

because it's hoped that the German people

won't know too much about its existence.

As the Nazi's start to tighten their grip

on German political life,

more and more people

are being pulled off the streets of Berlin and the surrounding cities

and locked up in this place.

But the camp was only one part of this terrifying crusade.

The now decaying structure nearby also played a key role

in the cruel Nazi project.

It was a place in which prisoners were forced to work.

You were worked seven days a week, your ration was minimal.

Now these weren't specifically death camps

but people were worked close to death.

This was the ss bakery,

a place built to feed their captors.

As local expert Horst seferens tells us,

working here was simply another form of torture.

(Speaks in foreign language)

Translation: "These big stoves or the remains of them

"had been producing thousands of loaves of bread

"day after day.

"What a misery it would have been for them

"to see all that food being produced here in abundance

"while all of them and their fellow inmates in the camp

"were starving."

It's a dreadful irony

that the bakery might also have been one of the few places

to offer a glimmer of hope, but the dangers were great.

Prisoners in German concentration camps

were systematically starved

so even some crusts that had fallen off of bread

in those industrial ovens

might mean the difference for them between life and death.

You might think that,

oh, if you took the end of the loaf

that they were going to lop off anyway

or a crust that fell on the floor

it would be no big deal but of course it was a big deal.

The German's were big on insisting on obedience,

you'd be mercilessly beaten.

Despite the perils,

a former prisoner remembers that for some

their desperate circumstances left little choice.

Translation: "He reports that they smuggled the bread

"into the camp.

"By halving the loaves lengthways tying them around their calves

"so that they were covered by their wide trousers

"and could be smuggled into the camp.

"Of course, it was very dangerous."

The cruelty and inhumane conditions here

were shocking,

but sachsenhausen had another grim purpose.

The ss, one of Hitler's most feared organisations,

used it as a testing ground.

Translation: "On the second floor of the central watchtower,

"the so-called 'tower a',

"through which the inmates entered the concentration camp,

"a machine gun was stationed here as well as two guards

"who were standing here day and night.

"One of the model features of sachsenhausen

"was that the guards standing up here

"were able to control the entire camp

"from this central point."

Sachsenhausen was the first of its kind, the dark template

for future concentration and death camps.

While other sites used a rectangular model

rather than this triangular shape,

the key feature was obvious in both -

it provided clear lines of sight to prevent escape.

You would be gunned down either by that guard at the apex

or in the guard towers scattered around the facility.

There was a need that people wouldn't escape

because their labour was needed

but also they didn't want people to escape and spread the word

of what was going on inside these camps.

Translation: "The concept had a psychological effect as well,

"wherever the prisoners moved in the camp

"this watchtower was to be seen from everywhere.

"They basically looked directly into the hole of this machine gun

"symbolically expressing the total power of the ss."

As the prototype camp this place played another vital role

during the early years of the Nazi regime.

In the mid '30s

the Nazi's were just starting to figure out

how to build a concentration camp.

The Nazi's are hiring ordinary police officers

and they're hiring ordinary tradesmen

and sachsenhausen is the place

where an ordinary German can be turned into an ss killer.

Helping to feed this dreadful system was the bakery.

And its success meant that the next chapter

in its tragic story would soon begin.

When world war ii begins in 1939

and Germany massively mobilised, calls all the reserves,

expands conscription,

you suddenly have a need for bread, you know,

to feed all the big Garrison around Berlin.

At the beginning production is moderate,

we're talking 10,000 loaves a day,

later on, you're talking of a much greater expansion

of four to five times of the original factory output.

Everything here was soon replicated at sites all across the German reich.

The Nazi's had made a success of slavery,

so that too was increased and expanded on a horrifying scale.

Because this is one of the early attempts

to set up a large ss industrial enterprise,

this is used as a model for other large ss facilities.

By the middle of world war ii

the ss is one of the largest industrial operations

in the third reich.

Forced labour became a key element of the Nazi war machine.

The infamous slogan on the gate,

"work sets you free," was very far from the truth.

Translation: "In fact, working in a concentration camp

"had a completely different function.

"Work here had always been an instrument to abuse,

"torture and even put prisoners to death.

"Of course, that slogan was used to conceal the reality."

But in a final twist of fate

the bakery that had helped feed the vicious ss regime

turned out to be the lifeline

for those few inmates fortunate enough

to see the end of the war.

It came with the liberation of the camps by the Soviets.

The Soviets find this bread factory

and they press in it into service to feed their own troops,

to feed the 3,000 or so surviving inmates.

And for these camp inmates it must have been fantastic

because they'd been looking hungrily

at these thousands of loaves of bread made every day,

and suddenly,

they have the opportunity to eat them.

The fact that people remained alive

in this concentration camp was almost miraculous.

The fact that there was a bakery nearby

that could feed them was a blessing.

With its darkest years now behind it,

the bakery remained in use until the 1990s

when it was devastated by a fire.

But as the years of horror recede further from memory,

today the two sites are as important as ever.

Translation: "They testify the very existence of these camps

"and crimes.

"And that cannot be denied.

"We think that these architectural witnesses

"will be all the more important in the future.

"Because the people who once survived the terror

"of the ss in these camps

"will soon no longer be amongst us."

In the arid plains of Nevada, usa, miles from any signs of civilisation

are the dusty remains of a crumbling site.

This is a harsh place to live,

it's in the middle of the desert, the sun is beating down on it,

but it's not clear

what exactly would have caused such devastation.

Everything is almost completely dismantled,

kind of like what you see in a very ancient ruin.

But when you look more closely

you can see it's not actually that old,

you can see signs of concrete.

Something swept through here,

something's happened to take away the structure.

A closer inspection of the strange features here

begins to reveal the bizarre chain of events

that contributed to its downfall.

We're looking for clues

and one of the details that stands out

is the tree trunks just all kind of cut off.

Another detail,

is that everything is incredibly weathered,

there's no sharp edges, there's no right angles here,

everything's been rounded off.

What's really strange

is that you're in the middle of the desert

but there are shells

which might actually be the clue

that describes exactly what happened here.

It's really hot out here.

We're in the mojave desert,

and temperatures can get up to 115 degrees

in the summer.

The most important thing being out here

is to have a lot of water with you.

As an archaeologist with the national park service,

Erin eichenberg has made extensive studies

of the land around the ruins.

And she thinks that despite the searing heat,

the attractions of the site were clear.

This is a pretty inhospitable place to live

but because we're near the confluence

of the virgin and the muddy river here

people were able to make it work and lived here for over 70 years.

Based around agriculture the settlement here once blossomed,

but the seeds of its destruction

were actually sown in the mid 19th century,

when a group of mormons arrived hoping to establish a town here.

When the first settlers arrived here in 1865

this was the middle of nowhere

in the middle of nowhere.

They thought they were still within the boundaries of Utah

but it turned out they'd moved into Nevada.

And when the tax inspector turned up

and informed them that they weren't in Utah

they actually decided to move on and burnt the town to the ground.

So what we see here today is the next stage of this town,

this is the following story.

So the early settlers left this place a burnt-out ruin.

But it would eventually see a second destructive event,

and this time

the cause could hardly have been more different.

This is the ghost town of st Thomas.

So after the mormon's moved out, other settlers moved in,

they started farms, they built a village

and they were able to establish a pretty self-sufficient community.

They were pretty remote,

in the desert but they had everything they needed,

they had built a really nice life for themselves,

they didn't need for anything.

But whilst st Thomas began life as a hidden secret

deep in the desert,

the evidence here of an old rail track

on the edge of town

explains why it didn't remain secret for very long.

At the beginning of the 20th century

the world is getting smaller,

america is turning a corner at this point,

railways are spreading across, the population was growing,

opportunity is out there.

And this brings, you know, great hope

for the people living here.

In the beginning, at least, modernity bought prosperity.

Once the railroad arrived, the highways soon followed.

We're on main street of st Thomas

and as you can see it's a big wide road,

enough for horse and carriage and later automobiles.

St Thomas was one of the stopping points

along Los Angeles to salt lake city.

And so, on the other side of these stumps

we'd have buildings and businesses

that would have supported the tourists

that were coming into town,

not just the people that lived here at st Thomas.

The town was spread out over almost 200 acres.

It had everything - stores, garages,

it even had an ice cream parlour.

Surrounding all this was beautiful farmland

where feeds of wheat, cotton and other fresh produce grew.

At its height, around 500 people lived here.

Life was good

and so it seemed were the prospects for the town.

St Thomas is an established community

at this point.

It has a school, it has a graveyard,

it's about the past and the future,

and then suddenly that's all about to change.

Walking through the barren streets today

gives us a sense of what life was once like here.

But there are also hints about what caused its demise.

These shells aren't something you'd normally find in the desert,

you'd normally find them near the ocean.

But these shells are found all over the site here

so it's actually a clue to what happened to this town.

One of the key things to surviving in the desert

is water.

But it was actually water that led to the downfall

of this settlement.

A dramatic transformation was about to take place.

The dry and dusty streets of st Thomas were swallowed up

by a flood of biblical proportions.

The rising waters reached st Thomas in 1938

and filled the streets and covered the buildings,

and ultimately,

it reached a height of 60 feet above where the town had been.

The desert town of st Thomas was no more.

It must have been a really bizarre thing to watch

because here you are in the middle of the desert

and suddenly, you're being flooded by water.

Perhaps the disaster came as little surprise

to the town's citizens.

After all they'd had years of warnings.

In the 1920s

plans for one of the most ambitious construction projects

of the 20th century had been announced -

the hoover dam.

We're in lake mead, Nevada.

We're near hoover dam at the bottom end of the lake,

it stretches 85 miles today to the upper end

where the Colorado river dumps in.

Local resident Christopher hentzner

has been navigating these waters for 40 years.

When they dammed hoover dam, of course, it filled up the lake

and basically covered the mountains and the valleys.

Right now we're pushing 400, 450 feet deep.

The lake contains approximately 200,000 to 300,000 acres

of covered water.

Work began in 1931,

the plan was to build the world's tallest dam.

The idea behind hoover dam

was to harness the power of the Colorado river.

They would use it to make electricity,

they would also use the water for irrigation,

they would make the desert bloom.

The hoover dam project was going to benefit so many people

in different states,

but it came at a very high price to some.

For the people of st Thomas this was a disaster

on a very personal level,

their homes were going to be literally washed away.

Ancestors, their history, their stories,

just covered up by feet of water.

Trees were cut down,

anything salvageable was removed from the town.

And as the waters Rose,

the last inhabitants rode away from their homes.

But if this town was lost to the deep,

why are its streets today filled with sand and not water?

The answer is revealed by the watermarks on the cliffs.

100% full is the top of the white line,

and today we're at 42% full,

129 feet below that line.

The last time it was full at the top of the watermark

was in 2000,

but since then it's been in a steady decline.

Years of drought and increasing demand for water

have put enormous pressure on the supply.

As a result the water's here have receded

and st Thomas is exposed once again.

St Thomas may have risen again but it gives us a stark reminder

of the pressing need to regulate water usage

in an ever expanding modern world.

The bottom line, there's not enough water.

It's a finite supply.

It's going to require conservation on the people's part.

Today water's the most valuable resource in the desert.

It's the new gold.

In Latvia, in Eastern Europe is a dilapidated set of ruins

which are falling in to the sea.

It's very strange you know,

you arrive here on the baltic coast of Latvia,

beautiful and very natural...

..And then you see this objects littered around the beach

that look almost ufos that have just kind of dropped on to the beach,

these big wheels and slabs of concrete.

Here you see large concrete buildings

and they have broken in half.

It looks as if it's been struck by a major catastrophe.

Whatever this was they spent heavily and extensively

to build something vast.

Strange towers, overgrown bunkers

and other fortifications are found nearby.

But there's more still.

Further inland there are entirely different style of buildings

with very different architecture, much more ornate

but they're also crumbling, also destroyed.

With this level of destruction across both sites

clearly something went very horribly wrong here.

100 years ago a bitter and bloody battle took place here...

..But all records of it were somehow erased from history.

Finally, now, the ruins here

are beginning to give up their forgotten secrets.

At the end of the 19th century

this stretch of coastline in modern day Latvia

sat on the fringes of the Russian empire.

These structures were built with the challenges

of an ever changing world very much in mind.

1890 the old alliance Russia is starting to fall apart

and the Russians are clearly looking at the Germans

as likely future enemies.

The Russian empire is completely reorienting itself strategically

so you see a complete focus on defending the baltic sea.

The Russians tsar chose the port of liepaja

for the new defensive constructions.

They were supposed to counter that ever growing German threat.

However time would prove them to be a grave mistake.

Local expert kristers krafts has explored every inch of this site.

It seemed on the surface at least to offer a formidable position

for artillery defences.

What we see here is a small part of the fortifications

built here along the coast.

This is battery number one, there are eight on the coast.

This Cannon right here,

it would be on a platform but rotates left to right

and it could shoot in any direction at any ships coming on.

The prime position also meant that a huge force

would need to be stationed here to man the guns

that would be trained upon the waters to the west.

The aim was to create the mother of all coastal defences

that no-one in their right mind would ever attack.

These are the northern forts of karosta,

the Russian naval war port of the city of liepaja.

But this was only one section of a much larger system of defences

against the inevitable German attack.

You see the creation of a big breakwater

that juts a mile into the sea,

that was created so that you could then

shelter big warships behind it

and then all of these forts ran out by the break water

and then all along the beach

so that no enemy fleet could come in,

get close enough to bombard the port, to blockade the port,

to try to attack the port.

From here the defensive lines then ran inland.

The tsar's aim was to turn the port into a fortified city,

the area was vast 14 or 15 square miles

with coastal defences on the sea front

and on the rest walls and moats,

all of it protected by some of the most powerful weaponry

that he had access to.

At the heart of this grand fortress complex

was everything needed to keep the port operating

and the walls defended.

This fortification system was huge,

protecting the naval base, harbour of liepaja

which would station more than 100 warships, some 20,000 soldiers.

There would be housing for them all, gunpowder storage, laboratories,

training centres, ship building factories

and so on and on.

But not everything about karosta was perfect.

The main attraction of the site

was that the port was ice free all year round,

the danger though and the vulnerability

even though it's one of the reasons for it's existence

was it's proximity to Germany.

The fundamental problem with this is only about 50 miles

from the closest German port of memel.

You are right on the front lines if a war occurs

and you don't want to risk too much of your fleet

right on the front lines.

Karosta took 13 long years to build.

But by the time it was completed in 1906

it wasn't only it's location that was giving cause for concern.

Basically, this place was no longer up to the job

it was supposed to do.

Military technologies advanced very fast,

faster than anything else and therefore,

there was no chance that this fortification

could stand any longer.

Because it was built without any metal reinforcement

larger more destructive artillery shells

could now easily penetrate the defences.

So after just two years of use it was suddenly abandoned.

When they rethought their strategy

and they realised that this was not going to work,

this is reduced to a relatively unimportant military installation

by the time world war I begins.

Having decided to abandon the northern forts,

the Russians tried unsuccessfully to dismantle them

so they were simply left deserted.

I think eventually, had the tsar kept this fortress

world war I would have destroyed it anyway.

I don't think there is a chance

that this would have helped the Russians if they kept it.

However, that was not the end of the story for this fortress.

Within a few years it would be the scene of a bitter battle

that is largely forgotten by the history books.

The story began in 1915 during world war I

when German forces stormed through liepaja

capturing the city and the fortifications.

But the Russian empire was soon facing far greater problems.

This period was the beginning of the end of the Russian empire.

The vast losses sustained in the war

and the tsar's inability to manage the war effort

led to sweeping changes back home and the Russian revolution.

The final Germany defeat in the first world war came in 1918.

Soon after Latvia decided to strike out for independence.

This movement began in the capital Riga

but the battle soon came to the old fortress of liepaja

and here to the redan fort.

This little Latvian army

that's fighting this kind of triangular conflict

against the, the Soviets on the one front

and these German troops coming out of Germany.

So the Latvian army knew that the Germans are coming,

and they had to get ready for an attack.

But, the thing is, there were only about 50 of them here.

There would have to be at least 100, 200 men

to properly protect this fort.

There should be at least ten cannons on this fort, they had none.

It was a desperate situation, to be honest.

With the odds now heavily stacked against them,

the Latvian army was forced to retreat.

The Germans duly took the fort

but many German troops were quickly moved on

presenting the Latvian fighters with a great opportunity.

So, they knew if they retake this fort,

they might just manage to get rid of Germans altogether.

The only way to get in here is that bridge

and probably there's German artillery,

probably they're still outnumbered, they just didn't know that.

They had to take their chances, use the element of surprise

and just storm in here.

And that's what they did, not without losses,

but they managed to take this fort.

A year after the world war I armistice was signed

the fighting across liepaja brought an historic chapter to a close.

The Latvians win, German's withdraw

and the last act of world war I is actually finished,

the last battle is actually liepaja.

Ultimately it was not only war that caused the damage here...

..Time, neglect and nature

have also been great forces of destruction.

In the end it's 100 years of erosion that has destroyed these forts,

the ground has been ripped away from under them by the sea

and now they are simply crumbling into the water.

Unfortunately for Latvia, independence was short lived.

The country was forced under Soviet rule

for much of the 20th century

and the brief story of it's independence

was simply stricken from the record.

As a result these structures

have assumed an even greater importance today.

This part of history was completely wiped out,

completely rewritten.

And people were afraid to talk about it,

to talk about it with their children

in the fear of being deported for just mentioning these things.

And now we want to remember all these things,

to make them known for our people.

200 miles east of Johannesburg,

South Africa's biggest city is dramatic mountainous countryside.

This desolate landscape is border region,

this is the mountain range between Swaziland and South Africa

and there is nothing here apart from nature.

The mountains are craggy, it's remote,

it's difficult to access so if you want to be there,

there has to be a pretty good reason.

But if you look very, very carefully,

tucked away in places, mankind has left it's Mark

and it's not just planting a flag.

Dotted along the valley

is surprising evidence of human engineering.

All of a sudden this incredible construction comes into view.

But we have these pylons,

we have these tall thin lattice towers

supporting a cable way, just a few places

you can actually see the remains of some form of carriage.

There are objects hanging from the cables,

cars for holding something but where were they coming from

and where were they going to?

At one end the cables lead up to a sprawling mountain top site.

Amongst the battered buildings and rusting machinery

hang numerous eerie carriages.

When humanity makes its Mark on the planet

we always do it for a reason

and here it's just hard to make that out,

it doesn't look like a leisure set up,

it doesn't look like a military installation.

Whatever it was that merited this incredible effort of construction,

has to lie the end of this cable line.

But if it was so valuable why was it abandoned

and why does this machinery now stand still on the landscape?

In the late 19th century

gold and diamond prospectors struck lucky across Southern Africa.

Their impact was sudden and dramatic.

The discovery of gold and diamonds changed everything

especially in the interior of South Africa

which was, which was very sparsely populated,

mostly by various indigenous African groups.

All of a sudden you have Europeans flooding in to the interior

to export this new resource, they're going to build mines,

they're going to build railroad lines

and the population of the entire region is going to boom as a result.

Salon bars, music halls and hotels

sprung up to service the swelling population

of the new boom town of barberton.

Unfortunately the gold rush here was short lived

and prospectors soon left barberton to search for gold elsewhere.

But the few diggers left behind

then began to unearth a very strange substance.

The miners were looking for tell tale signs of gold

but they found something else, this white fibrous material.

It would be another quarter century

before they realised just how important

this strange fibre would be

and their lives would be changed forever.

This previously unknown material

would bring yet more fortune to the region...

..But it came at a deadly price.

It was mined by the havelock gold mining

and exploration company.

Havelock mine had one of the wonder materials of the 20th century,

just sitting there underground waiting to be extracted.

The mysterious fibrous material

that for decades miners had simply cast aside

was asbestos.

The actual asbestos is up the top of the mountain,

it can be extracted quite easily

but getting it to a point where you could transport it

is 20km away,

water's not an option for transportation,

roads are very, very difficult

so they had to think in an imaginative way

and, boy, did they.

There are 52 towers supporting the steel ropeway

and the overall distance is 20km.

When it was built it was the longest cable way outside Europe.

On a normal working day 2,500 bags,

that's about 120 tonnes of asbestos fibre

make this journey to the outside world.

What a lovely way to go.

Exploring this sprawling site is local expert Tony ferrar.

The purpose was to transport asbestos

to the railhead here in barberton

and coal back to havelock mine to power the generators.

A critical aspect of the cable wear

was that you had to balance the goods coming out

which was asbestos

and the coal going back had to be exactly equal.

Once you start using your imagination

and you get your engineering brain in the game

this is the obvious solution.

Pylons, nice lightweight you can carry them up the mountain,

bolt them all together, get them going

and then the cable way, string that up

and suddenly you have this moving roundabout.

The materials were carried in cradles

or coco pans around the 13-mile loop.

The whole cableway is about 52 pylons

and it would take a single coco pan two hours to do the trip.

Behind me are the big sheds where the asbestos was stored,

it all arrived in 50kg bags

and was exported by rail truck to Johannesburg.

From Johannesburg asbestos was exported worldwide

as demand exploded.

Insulation for homes and electric wiring,

cement, brake pads, precast panels for buildings,

it's uses were many and varied.

30,000 to 40,000 tonnes of asbestos

was shipped out to around the world every single year.

For decades, the mine was the largest single employer in Swaziland.

It's thousands of workers lived in the small nearby town of bulembu...

..They had no idea what fate had in store for them.

No-one really knew the deadly nature of this material

least of all the people who were mining it at the time.

Asbestos the very, very fine fibres,

the thing that made it such an amazing material

also turned it into a killer.

Asbestos contains microscopic fibres that get into the lungs

and cause cancer and other really deadly ailments

so the miners were not only being paid very low

but they were also paying with their health and their lives

to keep this industry going.

In fact, the dangers of asbestos had been known for some time...

..But by the 1960s the evidence could no longer be ignored.

Asbestos producing companies

have long suppressed the dangers of this material,

the knowledge that microscopic fibres

could get into people's lungs and cause cancer

and that was just the people who were around asbestos,

you can imagine how dangerous it was for the workers.

As public awareness about the dangers of asbestos increased,

Turner and newell the British company that operated the mine was hit

by a wave of compensation claims.

Even as one of the largest asbestos companies in the world

they couldn't cope.

Then suddenly this amazing boom town had no purpose,

the population went from 10,000

to about 600 people almost overnight.

And today when we look around this is what we see,

we see the legacy of huge scale mining operation

with no purpose anymore.

After the mine finally closed in 2001

Turner and newell entered voluntary bankruptcy

to avoid compensating the remaining miners and their families.

It also absolved them of their responsibility

for paying to clean up the mine

so leaving the hazardous fibres blowing in the wind.

But happily,

barberton has been given a new life away from gold and asbestos.

Some of the oldest and best preserved rocks

dating back millions of years have been discovered there

and they are providing an invaluable window

into how the earth evolved in to a green planet able to support life.

Barberton born out of gold

but now it's future is in the scientific value of these rocks.

They were laid down at the time that life began

and there's no bigger question in science

than how and where did life begin and that is barberton's future,

it's the scientific value

attracting visitors from all over the world.

These scientific studies

are promising a very different and brighter future for this region,

a future based on tourism.

Now they are abandoned crumbling ruins,

many remind us of dark times

but some were once beacons of hope and progress,

lasting testimonies to human imagination,

enterprise and spirit.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV