The most northerly city in the world, the remote Russian mining town of Norilsk is dark for two months of the year and has a truly chilling past, The Sun reports.
Home to 170,000 people, the city in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia, eastern Russia, is one of the most remote cities on the planet.
It is closer to the North Pole than it is to the Russian capital – the Pole is 2400km away while Moscow is 2800km – and it is 1500km from its regional capital of Krasnoyarsk.
There are no roads that will take you to Norilsk. One freight railway line runs in and out of the city, and the port city of Dudinka 60km away provides a route to the city by sea – although it is frozen over in the winter.
The city is so cut off that when locals leave they joke that they are “going to the mainland”.
Norilsk only got a proper internet connection in 2017 – until then the city relied on an unreliable satellite link.
The only year-round way to get to this far-flung corner of Russia is to fly, although even that isn’t easy.
After a more than four-hour flight from Moscow, visitors are greeted by an apocalyptic hellscape built on the site of a Soviet prison camp.
In September 2016, the nearby Daldykan river turned blood red in chilling scenes.
No official explanation was given for this terrifying phenomenon, which some locals put down to a “message from God about an impending world war”.
The more likely reason given was a run-off at the nearby smelting plant.
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https://www.news.com.au/travel/destinations/inside-worlds-most-depressing-city/news-story/013266e8f51a0f50e9b6c88819aea29f