How do you find abandoned places legally?

Where this applies. The registries below are French, because that is where the sources are verifiable and where a large part of this catalogue sits. The method transfers: every country with a heritage authority and a land registry has equivalents, and the last two sections apply anywhere.

Where do you actually look?

In public registries. The French state, local authorities and public bodies have been inventorying brownfield land, monuments, former industrial sites and protected buildings for decades. Those inventories are free to consult and several are downloadable as open data.

That is the methodological difference from word of mouth: a public registry tells you what a place is, sometimes who owns it, and what happened there. A private group gives you a position and nothing else.

Cartofriches: the national brownfield inventory

The most directly useful base, and the least known. Cerema produces it for the ministry of ecological transition, to help local authorities and developers locate and characterise brownfield sites for reuse.

It is consultable online on a map, and the dataset is published on data.gouv.fr under Open Licence 2.0, refreshed quarterly. Each site carries its location, its land parcel, the type of owner, known pollution status and the applicable planning rules.

Cerema is explicit about one limit, which is worth repeating: the inventory does not claim to be exhaustive. Coverage depends on the local observatories that feed it, and it is uneven across the country.

Historical maps and aerial photography

Remonter le temps, IGN’s comparison viewer, overlays today’s map, aerial photography from the 1950s to the 2000s, and the nineteenth-century cartes d’état-major.

Its value fits in one sentence: what appears on a 1965 frame and not on a 2020 one has gone or been abandoned. A cluster of buildings visible in all three surveys, with no recent road access around it and no clean roofline in the latest frame, is visible to the naked eye.

The same tool explains context: a factory reads with its rail spur, a sanatorium with its grounds, a barracks with its parade ground.

Archives and local press

Once a site is identified, the archives tell you what it was.

FranceArchives gives access to the catalogues of national, departmental and municipal archives. Departmental archives hold planning files, plans, Napoleonic cadastral maps and company records. Gallica, at the national library, puts historical press online: a factory closing, a château burning, a hospital being built all leave a dated written trace.

That material is what separates a documented record from an uncaptioned photograph. It is also, often, what gives you the last known owner’s name.

How to find out who owns a site

Two steps, one free, one regulated.

1. Identify the parcel. The cadastral map is free to consult on cadastre.gouv.fr. You take down the commune, the section and the parcel number.
2. Request the cadastral extract. That reference lets you ask the land tax office for a property statement, using form 6815-EM-SD (Cerfa no. 11565*04). For transfers after 1956, the land registry office also supplies details of successive owners.

Release to a third party is capped, and it is worth knowing before you start: the statement given to someone who is not the owner is stripped of dates and places of birth, spouse references and person-related exemptions. Requests must stay occasional — five per week and ten per calendar month to the same office. Notaries, chartered surveyors and lawyers are exempt from the mandate requirement; nobody else is.

Those rules are not red tape. They say what the land file is: a tax instrument, not a directory.

How to ask for permission

This is the only route that gives you an actual right of access. It fits in a letter or an email, and it works more often than people expect when the request is specific and the intent legible.

A complete request contains:

1. Who you are: name, contact, and the group or association if there is one.
2. What you are asking for: access to that building, that date, that time window, that many people.
3. Why: to document, to photograph, to record a condition before works. A clear purpose beats a vague formula.
4. Your insurance: a civil liability certificate, attached. It removes the owner’s main objection.
5. What you undertake to do: move nothing, take nothing, publish no position, and share the photographs if they want them.
6. A written answer. A verbal nod proves nothing to a police officer. A two-line email does.

If the owner is a commune, the request goes through the town hall; for a company, through its property department or site manager. A refusal is a refusal: it closes the subject rather than moving it.

There are also routes that need no request at all: European Heritage Days, owner-led open days, preservation societies and volunteer restoration camps open sites every year that stay shut the rest of the time.

What the community adds

A public inventory tells you a building exists. It does not tell you whether it is still standing, whether it was sealed last month, or whether it changed hands.

That is what verified contributions add: an observed condition, a date, a type, a region. On Urbex Legends every place is submitted by a member and reviewed by moderation before it is published; the public pages give the name, type, condition and administrative area, and the per-region and per-type counters are readable straight from the category pages.

What not to do

• Publish a position. A coordinate in circulation turns a fragile place into a destination, and closes it for everyone within months.
• Forget a photo’s metadata. An image file carries its EXIF data, including the GPS position written by the phone. Posting the file posts the coordinate. The app strips that metadata before upload; anywhere else, you strip it yourself.
• Force anything. A locked door, an intact window, a standing fence are an answer. What French law punishes precisely is set out in our guide on legality.
• Take an object. What is left in a place still belongs to someone, and an object removed from its context loses what it was documenting.