How many abandoned places are there in France?

What this page counts. The dated figures below describe records listed in the catalogue on 6 September 2026 and public inventories on the stated dates. They are neither a national census nor proof that every place was submitted by a member or visited and verified on site.

How many abandoned places does Urbex Legends list in France?

2,098, as of 6 September 2026. The site’s France hub shows that total, and it also shows what sits behind it: most of these records are thin.

Those labels have exact meanings:

• Proper name: the record carries a real name of at least three characters, not a generated label such as “Abandoned factory · Nouvelle-Aquitaine”.
• Member-written description: at least 120 characters written by a member or by moderation. Twenty-five French records clear that bar.
• Logged visit: a member has recorded a visit to the place in the app.

Twenty-five descriptions across 2,098 records: the map knows that a place exists far more often than it knows what the place is.

How do the 2,098 places break down by region?

The snapshot contains 18 region labels for 1,207 records, or 57.5% of the French total. The 14 rows below cover 1,203 records; four further records have foreign region labels, detailed after the table.

These fourteen lines total 1,203 places. The remaining four, described below, make up the 1,207.

891 records fall outside the 18 regional groups in the snapshot (2,098 − 1,207). They must not be confused with the four records assigned foreign regions, which are included in the 1,207. The displayed table therefore covers 1,203 records and leaves 895 outside its 14 rows.

The same gap repeats one level down. Nouvelle-Aquitaine holds 179 places, of which only 69 carry a department. The other 110 stop at the region.

Two anomalies in that table. The label “Île de France d’Outre-mer” groups six places and is not an administrative region; it appears above as “Overseas France”. And four records attached to France carry a foreign region: Bratislava, Noord-Holland, Région flamande, Région wallonne, one place each. Those four count toward the 2,098. They are a filing error, not a geography.

What kinds of places does the French catalogue hold?

Eight of the nine types in the site’s taxonomy. No barracks are listed in France at this date.

The remaining 306 records (14.6%) sit in the “other” category, which takes whatever the nine types of the taxonomy do not cover and which the site gives no page of its own.

Castles dominate, and the gap with the rest of the world is stark: of the 911 castles listed across the catalogue’s 44 countries, 660 are French, or 72%, in a country that accounts for 13.8% of the total. Houses lean the same way, more modestly: 416 of the catalogue’s 1,899 houses are French, or 22%.

That concentration mixes two causes the data cannot separate: what French building stock contains, and where the contributors who feed the map happen to live.

Where does France sit in the global catalogue?

Second, behind the United States, out of 44 countries.

The whole catalogue holds 15,207 places across 44 countries as of 6 September 2026. The 44 country rows add up to exactly that total, which is how a reader can check the figures without any access to the database.

What these figures are worth, and where the gaps are

A catalogue is not a census. It gathers records from several sources. A census seeks to cover a defined population; this catalogue cannot measure every abandoned place in a country.

Four limits, in the order in which they bite:

1. No coverage rate. The total number of places is unknown.
2. Collection bias. Sources and contributions do not cover every region equally. Their relative influence is not measured here.
3. Incomplete fields. The snapshot includes 891 records without usable region data, 306 without a usable type and 2,073 without a description.
4. Changing conditions. A record does not guarantee a place’s current condition or accessibility.

The snapshot of 6 September 2026 showed 2,098 records for France. That is a catalogue count on that date, without national extrapolation or certification of a visit.

No national extrapolation appears on this page. Multiplying 2,098 by a chosen factor to reach a “real” total would produce a quotable number with nothing behind it.

Is there an official register of abandoned places in France?

No. No French authority counts abandoned places as such. Four public inventories each cover a slice, on definitions that do not line up.

Each producer attaches caveats, and the caveats are the heart of the matter.

Cerema dates its tally and does not present it as a running total: 15,000 sites and 60,000 hectares as of 1 April 2025, in a synthesis published in September 2025. That is the most recent verified tally at the date of this count. The Cartofriches application itself is fed continuously from local observatories, so a counter read there on another day does not compare directly with that tally.

BRGM is explicit about CASIAS: it maps the history of industrial and service activity on a territory, and makes no claim about actual soil contamination. It says nothing either about whether a site is abandoned today. It exists under article L125-6 of the French environment code.

Insee counts vacant dwellings, and this is the commonest confusion on the subject. A vacant dwelling is an unoccupied one: between tenants, in probate, under renovation, on the market. Insee says nothing about its condition. Vacancy is not abandonment.

Why the same country yields 2,098, 15,000 or 3 million

Because the three numbers count three different objects.

• 3.0 million vacant dwellings counts unoccupied homes, whatever their condition.
• 15,000 brownfield sites counts artificialised unoccupied land, whatever stands on it.
• 2,098 places counts sites a member judged worth documenting and a moderator then approved.

An office block empty for six months belongs to the first. A rail yard stripped down to its ballast belongs to the second. Neither has any reason to enter the third. A ruined château deep in a wood, on the other hand, appears in neither Insee nor necessarily Cerema, and it is in the catalogue.

So “how many abandoned places are there in France” has no single answer. It has as many answers as there are definitions of the word abandoned. Any page that gives a number without saying what it counts deserves to be read sceptically, this one included.

How this count was taken, and how to repeat it

Five steps, and anyone can replay them without special access.

1. Load the site’s France hub, which shows the total, the table by region and the table by site type, all computed on the full catalogue when the page was generated.
2. Load the Explore page, which gives the global total, the 44 countries and the site types across all countries.
3. Add up each table and compare the sum with the displayed total. On the country table both come to 15,207, so the reading is faithful. On the France tables, the gap between sum and total measures records outside the retained region or type categories, and that gap is where the 891 and the 306 come from.
4. Check one level down on a region, to confirm the same mechanism repeats. Nouvelle-Aquitaine served here.
5. Date the count. The pages state the date of their own last catalogue computation; the ones used here said 5 September 2026.

The site regenerates its pages automatically, so the numbers on this page will age. That is why they are dated. The live counters sit permanently on the France hub and on the Explore page, which are the source of everything above.

For the opposite method, starting from public inventories to find a place and its owner and then ask permission, the guide “How do you find abandoned places legally?” sets it out. What French law allows and punishes is covered in the guide on the legality of urban exploration. And whatever the number, the site’s rule does not move: this guide and place pages viewed without signing in do not provide access to the exact position.