Here’s a wallpaper I made from a photo taken at an abandoned theme park at the top of a hill in San Sebastian (click for full size).

I love abandoned places like this. The park was opened in 1909 or thereabouts, and there are plaques commemorating the monarch coming to visit, but now it’s almost totally closed down, slowly rotting at the top of this mountain. The atmosphere is tangible, the boarded up rides and stalls hinting at the thriving tourist destination the place once was. There’s even a barely-running hotel still there, although it didn’t look like it would be around for too much longer.

Visiting the park felt like a peek behind the scenes, a little window into a past era, just a glimpse, before the place is bulldozed and replaced with some new contemporary tourist centre, as it undoubtedly will be due to its prime location. It’s like looking round a derelict 19th century factory in the east end of London. It’s an opportunity to glimpse a place where so many people spent their lives, such a weight of memories, before it’s all flattened and redeveloped. I find the sense of history and departed life so powerful in these places.

I’ve been to places before where theme parks have been left abandoned because they are falling into the sea; it’s strange to see a place falling into the past, falling victim to erosion from the progression of time. The whole rest of the town is a bustling tourist centre, but this place at the top of the hill seems to have been forgotten, to have fallen off the map. I imagine that redevelopment plans are already well on their way…