This 75-year-old Soviet ‘floating city’ is slowly crumbling into the sea, like a modern-day Atlantis.
Neft Dashlari, also known as Oil Rocks, was built super fast in the late 1950s after oil was discovered in the sea near Azerbaijan. This place was the first-ever oil platform out in the ocean. It had roads over the water, a park, and even a big apartment block for people who worked there.
But now, after many years, this city on the sea is falling apart and sinking. There’s still oil deep down that could be pumped up for another ten years. By the time the city turns 100 years old in 2051, it might all be underwater.
The Guinness Book of Records writes about the city: “Neft Daslari is an entire functioning town constructed in the Caspian Sea 55 km from the coast of Azerbaijan.
“Construction began in 1949 and began oil production in 1951. Construction and development continued until the town included hotels, hostels, a bakery, a power station, and a total of 7 ha of surface area, consisting of separate ‘islands’ connected by more than 200 km of trestle bridges, all supported on metal stilts.
“Although much of Neft Daslari has been reclaimed by the sea, its rigs still produce oil and the town has a population of around 5,000.”
The city’s massive bases were built on shipwrecks, with more than 2,000 drilling platforms working at their peak to extract the precious resource.
It wasn’t just a work site, though. It also housed amenities such as a bakery, library, cinema, and even a football pitch. Only about 40 km out of the original 300 km of roads remain usable today. A devastating flood once submerged a block of flats until only the second floor was visible.
Sadly, if it continues to deteriorate, this enormous offshore structure could disappear under the waves, lost forever to the sea.
This comes as a perfectly preserved ancient city was found at the bottom of a lake in China last year. Shi Cheng was intentionally drowned by the Chinese government in 1959 to build a hydroelectric dam.
This ambitious project required the relocation of almost 300,000 people, some of whom had families who had resided in the city for hundreds of years.
