Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): The wreckage of a vast facility in Chile,

once a beacon of development.

The workers were put up on a pedestal.

They became heroes in the community.

Clearly at some stage something happened here

that changed that dramatically.

A Maltese ruin,

the one-time refuge for a modern icon.

You'd never guess who once lived here,

she's probably the most famous woman in the world.

A sweeping complex on the outskirts of Havana

that carried a revolutionary vision.

Message that he was trying to communicate

is that Cuba had moved on from its history

and was forging a new future.

And scattered remains in Germany

which stood at the heart of an evil empire.

What we see here is...

A deliberate attempt to be grandiose.

This is designed to inspire awe.

This is pompous architecture,

this is power madness expressed in stone.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

On the back streets of Malta's capital Valletta

lies a portal to a majestic world.

The buildings here all look pretty similar.

They're the same colour and they blend into each other

in these tightly packed streets.

But behind that door

is something quite spectacular and rather unexpected.

It's like a palace lost in the streets of the city.

When you step inside you can see this used to be a beautiful home.

It's bright, and open, and breezy.

It has an air of decadence and indulgence about it.

Further investigation reveals a hidden garden.

The gardens are overgrown

and the pillars are starting to crumble.

There's a balcony outside that stretches out to open vistas.

There are these beautiful carved reliefs

and these detailed sculptures

just decorating every feature of the place.

Every aspect of this space has been carefully thought through.

Who left behind these traces of decadence?

The way this place looks now,

you'd never guess who once lived here.

This was once home

to a powerful and influential couple who are famous the world over.

This is villa guardamangia, largely built in 1900.

Heritage expert Kenneth gambin knows

how grand this dilapidated place was...

During its hey-day in the mid-20th century.

It was stunning.

A very high standard with expensive furniture,

mostly of European origin.

Renowned paintings, rich curtains,

the interior was quite luxurious.

One would definitely have had to be a very important person

to live here.

And the layout of the rooms reveals more about the people

who once called this place home.

This used to a very busy part of the property.

This was the servants' quarters.

So, you can imagine the hustle and bustle

of every day work going on here.

This was a place that was designed

for entertaining and for status.

The strategic location of Malta

is the first clue to this buildings importance.

Malta is one of the most strategic chess pieces in history.

It's got a maritime history that stretches back thousands of years

that's full of dynamic change.

The British, on the invitation of the Maltese,

took over the island.

And subsequently in 1814 it was officially a British colony.

Malta was the premier overseas naval base for the British empire.

It was from here

that they had a point of entry to the middle east,

to India, and beyond.

It had long been the headquarters

of the British Navy's mediterranean fleet.

And by the world war ii,

Malta had become a key base for the allied powers.

Submarines were launched from here,

aircraft, ships, this was the allies' key base

in the middle of an access controlled sea.

The importance of the island didn't stop at the end of the war.

That naval foothold remained key.

And it's the British naval base

that bought the villa guardamangia's world famous residents

to the island's shores.

When you know how lived here,

it really lets you imagine

what an opportunity this place was for them.

It allowed them something

that they would only ever get a glimpse

of during their entire lifetime.

And that was privacy.

The royal naval base drew none other

than the newly wedded royal couple themselves,

Elizabeth and Philip.

The royal highnesses are staying

with vice admiral lord mountbatten and lady mountbatten

at their residence, the villa guardamangia,

and most attractive it looks.

When they arrived here in 1949

little did the royal couple know

that duty would soon call Princess Elizabeth

back to serve her country.

For the time being though

they could embrace life in this secluded home.

Elizabeth found a freedom here,

she and Philip could enjoy an independence in Malta.

And villa guardamangia allowed them to step away

from the media spotlight.

Monarchy in the 20th century was becoming more public.

The extremities of war drew the royal family out

so that they were in touch

with the ordinary people like never before.

Elizabeth and Philip married just after the war in 1947

when the country was still a wreck.

People wanted a lift.

Young Elizabeth was warm hearted, she was hard working,

understated, and extremely dignified.

Philip was personable, relatable, handsome,

had a great sense of humour and he made her happy.

The couple had been bombarded by press photographers

throughout their recent honeymoon.

And they were determined that this trip abroad would be different.

There are very few photographs

of Princess Elizabeth living in this property,

and one of them was taken right there.

The rooms of this dilapidated ruin

were unlike those of the grand palaces back home.

We are actually in what used to be the Princess' bedroom.

And this would have been the view

she would have enjoyed during her stay here.

The most striking feature of this site is the walkway.

It's not safe anymore but you can imagine back in the time

how you would have walked out of the first floor on to it

and just been greeted by this extraordinary view.

The great and the good passed through this place.

So, the couple would have entertained

their guests in this room.

This was the largest and the most important room

in the whole building.

It's where they threw private parties.

And you can just imagine how liberating

this must have been for Elizabeth.

She'd grown up in the formal, protocol-heavy,

stultifying atmosphere of the British royal palaces.

And now she was free, free to have her own home,

throw her own parties, have her own life.

The future queen could even go outside in private,

in the now overgrown garden concealed behind high walls.

The garden was a sanctuary,

away from others where Elizabeth's love for gardening

could really take root and grow.

But Elizabeth couldn't hide forever and eventually duty called.

It was a sad turn of events that bought it all to a swift end.

In September 1951,

king George had surgery at Buckingham Palace

to remove his left lung.

Someone had to take on the role that he could no longer fulfil.

So, Elizabeth increasingly assumed royal duties

and that meant that there was no more time for her in Malta.

Queen Elizabeth has been in the public eye ever since,

steering her nation over its choppy course.

Following her father's death,

Elizabeth's coronation in 1953

was the first to be broadcast live around the world.

Queen Elizabeth has basically broken every record there is.

She's the longest lived

and longest reigning British monarch,

plus she's probably the most famous woman in the world.

Malta achieved independence in 1964

and the villa guardamangia

would never be home to queen Elizabeth ii again.

If you look at her life as a whole,

her time here was something really very special,

it stands out.

It was the one time

when she and her husband

were actually allowed to be themselves.

In the years following the villa was left to rot

under the ownership of a reclusive old lady

who couldn't afford to maintain it.

And although the queen returned to Malta a number of times

in her later visits,

it's alleged that the owner denied her access to this hideaway villa.

This abandoned home is the only place outside of the UK

that a British monarch has resided.

And since the government of Malta took ownership in 2019

it's been keen to preserve it.

The government obviously wants to restore the building.

And we want the visitors to experience

how life was like for the Princess way back then in 1950.

Looking at the conditions this is fallen into...

It's hard to believe that this was once

a royal residence

but hopefully someday soon

it might return to it's former glory.

On the outskirts of the Cuban capital of Havana

lies the shattered dream of two freedom fighters.

These buildings are so fantastical.

Something really ignited someone's imagination

and let it run free in these shapes and these designs.

There's hardly a right angle in the entire place.

Few clues as to the sites original purpose

appear to have survived the ravages of time.

Clearly nature's been allowed to sort of takeover in a small way,

but then there are some areas that they look like foundations

and have never been completed.

There's a sense of whatever stopped

that process happening very abruptly.

So, what happened to crush this romantic vision?

(Music)

These swirling structures were born out of political upheaval.

In the 1950s

Cuba had been under the dictatorship of fulgencio Batista.

It was an incredibly corrupt country

and a small group of revolutionaries

started a war against the government.

Led by fidel Castro

and his loyal lieutenant Che Guevara,

their victory in 1961

may have divided opinion

but it broke the strangle hold of Batista's corrupt government.

And gave them control of places like Havana's golf club.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara,

they decide to go and play golf one day in the elite club,

a place that they'd previously never been allowed anywhere near.

They start to talk to each other

and say what a shame it is that this has been shut off

from most of the Cuban people.

They hatch a very ambitious plan to change this golf course

in to something else entirely.

The result was this.

Cuba's national school of art.

Built in the 1960s this series of ambitious structures

was designed to nurture excellence in ballet,

modern dance, visual arts, music and drama.

Local, Jose villa cabrera came to this other worldly place

to study sculpture.

You walk along the corridors,

you lose sense of where you're coming from

and where you're going, and that was intentional.

The message is that Cuba had moved on

from its history and was forging a new future.

But the idealistic campus,

it's vaulted structures reflecting the optimism of the time

soon began to look outdated.

As Soviet influence in Cuba grew, a storm was brewing.

It culminated in the Cuban missile crisis,

a nuclear stand-off between the Soviet union and the usa.

After the Cuban missile crisis,

the country was forced to start prioritising defence

over other considerations,

and suddenly this grand project faced a cash flow problem.

Construction was soon stopped

and the school closed down before it was completed.

The builders were pulled off site, the architects are let go,

and the schools are just left as they stand on that day.

Today the school is experiencing a renaissance

as international architects once again celebrate

its unique and optimistic design.

The future does look optimistic for these buildings,

they were so beautifully built in the first place.

And although never finished,

it looks finally funding might be available

from Europe to complete the job.

On the outskirts of Santiago, Chile,

epic warehouse style structures dominate the San bernado area.

The centrepiece of this neighbourhood,

what you can't miss is this huge concrete building

about 500 feet long.

If you think that's big, it used to be a lot bigger.

This site was once so large

that the original entrance was 1,000 feet away.

Right on the other side of the neighbourhood.

An inscription above these main gates

gives some indication of this sites original function.

Over the entrance is carved the words maestranza,

which in Latin America it usually means machine shop or repair shop.

If this was a machine shop

it was designed to handle something enormous.

Dappled light illuminates curious design features

inside the complex.

Along the floor are these gigantic pits,

big enough for a man to stand up in.

So, these uniformly spaced pits in the floor

would seem to be a place for workers to go

to work on the underside

of whatever it is they are assembling

or repairing above them.

Once impressively engineered

this place has long been stripped bare.

The fate of this compound is intimately connected to one man,

an ambitious dictator and his chilling legacy.

The ongoing mystery of Chile's so-called disappeared.

Derek hyland is passionate about the machines

that once rolled through here.

And a circular structure outside

provides the first clue to what they were.

A turntable is like a bridge which is pivoted at its centre

and would allow an engine to come in and be turned in any direction.

In this case it would be turned

so it could be placed in to the main workshop.

The design of this complex revolved around one thing, trains.

This place in particular...

Is the maker of the railways of this country.

And this transformed the life of this town,

this is basically was the heart of this town.

This is maestranza de San Bernardo,

once the second largest train workshop

in South America.

This is the roundhouse,

it has 11 stalls where they stored locomotives

once they were repaired.

The engine would come in here,

would have steps before so you could actually get under,

under the engine basically very similar

to inspection pit for a car.

The need for a facility of this kind

came with the rapid development of the country's rail network

in the late 19th century.

Chile's a long narrow thinly populated country.

So, harnessing railroads

was key to connecting it's far flung regions.

You've got the atacama desert in the far north

and you've got patagonia in the far south,

Santiago right in the middle,

and so the rails are a perfect way to connect up this big land mass.

Construction began in 1916.

Eight pavilions sprawled across 111 acres

with additional buildings and manoeuvring yards.

The country's industrialisation went hand in hand

with its railway development.

And the maestranza would become it's beating heart.

You can't overstate the importance of the maestranza

to the town of San Bernardo.

Without the maestranza there would be no San Bernardo.

The town was built around it

and almost every household had at least one person

working in the maestranza.

The scale was extraordinary.

The locomotives would come in by rail,

they would be lifted up by vast cranes fixed to the ceiling

and then put down in to the relevant area

of the workshop

where they could be investigated, dismantled, repaired,

and then sent out again on the rails.

The shop was set up initially for repairing trains,

but over time they began to design

and build their own steam locomotives.

Instead of importing railway wagons and locomotives,

Chile would build them itself

and so it would develop engineering capability,

manufacturing capability.

Maestranza was designed to service

approximately 500 engines a year.

That's nearly 10 engines a week.

In it's heyday, it is about 1,200 people working here.

In the 1930s, 1940s

this place would have been bustling with activity

with new engines probably in some stalls,

with repaired engines in other coming in and out.

And it was skilled work,

you needed a workforce that really knew

how to handle this machinery.

These were not only blue-collar workers

but these were local heroes.

These were men who were earning good wages,

learning skilled positions, expanding the Chilean economy.

This was really a kind of engine of Chilean growth at the time.

The maestranza workers were proud to form a union.

But later in the century that would be their undoing.

Seismic change was coming to Chile

and the maestranza would find itself in the firing line.

In 1973

the Chilean people elect Salvador allende,

a socialist to be president of Chile.

And there's great resistance

inside the highly conservative Chilean armed forces

commanded by general Augusto pinochet.

General pinochet instigates a violent coup against allende.

And despite planning to overthrow a democratically elected government,

pinochet had outside help from the United States.

The Nixon administration and national security advisor

Henry kissinger

look at the rise of allende as dangerous

as the rise of Castro in Cuba.

And so they give the green light to pinochet to move against allende,

and they oust allende.

Pinochet attacked the presidential palace

and Salvador allende killed himself to escape capture.

Coming from the political right,

pinochet was ideologically opposed

to socialism and it's ideas of large state run enterprises.

And you couldn't get a government run scheme

much bigger or more expensive than the national rail network.

In the days after the coup there was confusion and fear,

nobody really knew what to expect of this new dictatorship.

But workers still had to earn money and make a living,

so they continued to go to work at the maestranza.

Thousands of people, especially union members,

were accused of communist leanings

and began disappearing from work places

up and down the country.

And pinochet soon turned his attention on the maestranza.

You had all of these skilled workers,

all of them unionised,

all of them left leaning in their politics.

So, he sees the maestranza in the city

that's grown up around it, the company town,

as being a hotbed of communist and socialist activity.

On the September 28th of 1973, pinochet's men arrive.

Twelve members of the maestranza

were taken away by the military and shot.

The community was in shock when they heard about these news.

The six men in reality

weren't in any way a threat to pinochet.

They had communist leanings, but they weren't terrorists,

they were simply idealists

who were used to being able to debate and discuss

in a Democratic country,

but under pinochet that was over.

Across Chile,

more than 1,000 others were disappeared

during pinochet's reign of terror.

The maestranza itself continued to operate

but it finally closed in 1984.

When pinochet was able to point to the fact

that it was making a loss

that was enough for him to pull all of the funding.

And that sparked the beginning of the end of the maestranza.

The dictator's reign of terror lasted until 1990,

but he was never punished for human rights violations

against more than 30,000 people.

Thanks to enthusiasts like Derek,

this complex survives as a lasting memorial

to Chile's once booming rail industry,

and those who lost their lives at the hands of pinochet.

On the 6th of October every year,

the railway's workers day is commemorated

in remembrance of these 12 workers that were killed here.

I feel deeply motivated and proud of what we achieved.

Yet many people in Chile are still seeking closure

from this terrible time.

To this day, around 1,000 souls

are still officially listed as missing.

In Philadelphia, usa

is a sprawling complex that once housed america's most wanted.

Surrounded by high stonewalls,

this foreboding place is undoubtedly a prison.

From above, it's design looks innovative

but the interior is anything but.

Yet the cell of one disreputable inmate

is almost luxurious.

At least one of the cells we know of was in a place

called park Avenue,

so that gives you the idea

that he had more of a celebrity treatment here.

So, which infamous villain nicknamed scarface ended up here?

Sarah Jane elk is president of this once imposing building.

Eastern state penitentiary opened in 1829

and it was an experiment in reform.

At the time, eastern state penitentiary

was the most famous and expensive prison in the world.

Hundreds of jails copied its pioneering wagon wheel design.

It meant that a small group of guards

could keep an eye on the whole prison

from that one location.

The idea was we're not just gonna punish prisoners,

we're gonna allow them time to reflect and repent,

the word penitentiary comes from repent.

So, they isolated each prisoner by himself in a cell,

they didn't get to talk to each other,

they were supposed to spend their days

in quiet contemplation of their crimes.

But as inmate numbers grew,

cells meant for one soon housed two or three,

and even the advanced design features failed to work

as originally intended.

There were furnaces at the end of the cell blocks

and they were to heat the tunnels underneath the cells

and then the air was to flow in,

but the people closest to the furnaces

were getting carbon monoxide sickness

and people on the other ends were getting frostbite.

By the end of the century,

the notion of reflective solitary confinement

was replaced with overcrowding and harsh unsanitary conditions.

Although in 1929

an exception was made

for one of the most notorious criminals of all-time.

When al Capone came here, he was already a famous man.

He was bought here from the county prison

for his protection.

Capone lived the life of luxury compared to the other inmates,

and described his time inside

this elaborately furnished cell as easy.

In march 1930

he walked out of the penitentiary's gates as a free man,

only to be jailed again a year later.

And this once revolutionary prison closed due to over-crowding in 1971.

Today, the eastern state penitentiary

is a national historic landmark,

a museum which includes a tour of al Capone's cell.

In the German city of nuremberg is a vast overgrown site

that appears to have been built by different empires.

There's this enormous white marble structure

that when you look at it has the lines and proportions

of an alter from ancient Greece.

And you're like, "why is the pergamon altar here

"in a German provincial town?"

Another seemingly ancient relic is even more confounding.

It looks like a great amphitheatre, almost like the Roman colosseum.

These relics all seem to come from very different eras,

so it's really not clear what links them all together.

Elsewhere around the town

scattered ruins start to paint an ominous picture.

A single stone block beside an extensive manmade lake.

A subterranean room with a gold covered ceiling,

and a monumental road carving a line between them all.

It's only when you scratch beneath the surface

that you see that none of this is what it seems, it's all a facade.

The extent of this complex hints at a monstrous abuse of power.

The man who built this

did not think of himself as a villain,

he thought of himself as the builder of a mighty empire.

This is power madness expressed in stone.

These are the remains of the crazed vision

of a leader dubbed the most evil man in history.

But to do all this he needed the help of a willing

and ruthlessly ambitious collaborator.

Local expert Alexander schmidt

studies the history of this macabre place.

You can see here a colosseum in Germany that was never finished.

So, there is no roof on it.

It should be as double as high as we can see it now.

This enormous amphitheatre is over 800 foot long

and over 120 foot high.

It's covered in granite panels

and was designed to look like something straight

out of the Roman empire.

But this is not the only epic sized structure here.

Covering an area bigger than 12 football pitches,

this overgrown space is known as the zeppelin field.

In 1909 the German graf zeppelin,

who invented these big dirigible airships

actually landed a zeppelin here,

which gives you a sense of just how big the field had to be.

The zeppelin field now looks a little bit ruined,

but you can see white stone here.

And you have here, like in a football stadium,

some tribunes for the visitors.

So, what were these tribunes or grandstands built for?

Nuremberg itself is the first clue to figuring out

what this strange collection of ruins is all about.

Nuremberg was one of the great imperial cities

and it was the centre of an ancient germanic empire.

In the medieval era,

this early germanic empire was a political powerhouse

which dominated Europe for centuries,

until it's decline in the early 1800s.

By the 1930s, its greatness was a distant memory,

but a new ambitious political movement

sought to resurrect it's power in the form of Hitler's Nazi party.

Bavaria, where nuremberg is,

was the most nazified place in Germany.

So, it was natural that Hitler would gravitate to this region

to anchor the symbols of the Nazi regime.

Hitler seeks to build

his ritual centre here in nuremberg.

And all of these structures are designed

for thousands of people to listen to one man speaking.

But Hitler did not design all of this alone.

It was the work of his accomplice, the ambitious Nazi architect,

Albert speer.

Albert speer, you know, sniffed out early on...

Hitler's narcissism and megalomania,

and he kind of tailored his architecture

to suit Hitler's grandiose taste.

He is gonna create a Nazi architecture

that subordinates the will of the individual

to the collective will of the German race,

expressed through, der fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

Together they mapped out this collection of structures known

as the Nazi party rally grounds

and the zeppelin field lay at its heart.

This would be full of people,

of visitors who can see the big parades,

the celebrations on the fields.

On the fields are 100,000 or 200,000 uniformed men.

The rally grounds were designed to house

some of the most chilling demonstrations of power in history.

The grotesque crowning glory of the zeppelin field

was this auto light tribune.

This is the main tribune of the zeppelin field.

It's made of natural stone and especially from granite.

This architecture should show how strong the German state,

the third reich was.

Beneath the grandstand,

speer designed an extraordinary golden room

which allowed Hitler to indulge his sinister delusions.

It's a hall over 20 feet high

with the most spectacular golden designs on the ceiling.

And the idea was for Hitler to rise up

on to his rostrum as if out of thin air.

But speer had only just started.

He wanted his designs to provide a chilling setting

for Nazi propaganda films

and he would stop at nothing to get it built.

Albert speer as an architect

is a man with no professional integrity whatsoever,

Albert speer knows what Hitler wants

and he's gonna deliver it in every respect.

How can speer get the material, the granite?

And he has an idea, he made a cooperation with the ss,

with Heinrich himmler.

And they are founding concentration camps

near by quarries, granite quarries.

And it was the idea of Albert speer himself.

Albert speer uses concentration camp inmates,

he works them to death.

But regardless of the terrible human cost,

Hitler and speer would not be stopped.

At the perimeter of the rally grounds

is a foundation stone sitting on the edge of a man-made lake.

The only trace

of what was going to be the sites Jewel in the crown.

This is the place where the German stadium,

the biggest stadium in the world should be built, but it wasn't.

You can see that it's only the hole for the foundation now,

filled with water.

Speer's design was gonna hold 400,000 people.

It was gonna be built of red and pink granite

and over 400 feet high.

Had it been finished it would have been the capstone

to the nuremberg rally grounds.

The nuremberg rally grounds

would have radiated out from this monstrous stadium.

Covering four square miles it included the vast zeppelin field.

Its menacing grandstand,

all linked together by the great road

which led to the colosseum style congress hall.

But while the architecture here was monumental,

the materials used to build it were anything but.

Behind the solid stone facades was just brick and concrete.

The original construction was quick and shoddy.

It was little more than a stage set,

but designed to have the most dramatic effect.

Between 1933 and 1938

Hitler supporters flocked to this site

for a series of mass Nazi party rallies.

But with the outbreak of the world war ii,

construction ceased

and speer's chilling facade crumbled.

Hitler's empire was supposed to last 1,000 years,

but the hasty methods used to create the illusion

of mighty stadiums and gigantic pillars,

they were an illusion just like Hitler's reich.

At the nuremberg war crimes trials that followed the war,

Hitler's sidekick Albert speer presented himself as a good Nazi.

After the war he said,

"I'm only an architect, I'm an artist.

"I don't know anything about Auschwitz."

Speer gets off pretty lightly.

He only gets 20 years in jail because of this image or reputation

he had as the good Nazi

who sort of reluctantly fell in with Hitler.

Today, the ruins of Albert speer's ambition litter nuremberg.

This is not a monument

to Hitler's greatness or Nazi greatness,

because when you look at this you can see

what a pile of rubbish Nazi Germany really was.

(Music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV