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35 Top-Secret Locations You Need a Secret Knock or a Whole Lot of Money to Get Into

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35 Top-Secret Locations You Need a Secret Knock or a Whole Lot of Money to Get Into

January 22, 2024

Pack your bags, we’re going on a vacation! We’ll be visiting ultra-luxurious apartments hidden in plain sight in tourist centers, unfathomably huge dystopian mines, and if you’re lucky, the Supreme Court basketball court.

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35

Barcelona's Chapel Torre Girona looks like a Bond villain lair. On the outside, it's just a plain chapel. But the inside houses the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the 10240-core IVM PowerPC MareNostrum, one of Europe's fastest supercomputers. Breakthroughs in fields like human genome research happened in this chapel. CRACKED.COM — Source

34

A remote Arctic island hides a warehouse of the world's plant seed samples. - You might expect that kind of thing in sci-fi about eco-catastrophes, but this is real. The Global Seed Vault, which has samples from over 10,000 plants, is buried 390 feet deep and packed with security measures and booby traps to keep it safe from wannabe eco-supervillains. CRACKED.COM — Source

33

This is sci-fi artwork, right? Nope, it's a NASA photo of the 1,250-mile border wall between India and Pakistan. In their words, it's one of the few places on Earth where an international boundary can be seen at night. CRACKED.COM — Source

32

If you want to see comic book buildings in real life, go to El Alto, Bolivia. Even their interiors have these bright colors, crisp lines, and super-defined edges. Created by self-taught architect Freddy Mamani, they've been dismissed as flamboyant spaceships for the nouveaux riches. At least the first part of that sounds like praise to us. CRACKED.COM — Source

31

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation isn't an alien relic, but it might as well be. It's an obsessively crafted space whose every feature was based on the mathematics of, for example, fractals and black hole physics. And some parts of it are just flat-out trippy, designed to look like somebody fiddled with the concept of 3D space. CRACKED.COM — Source

30

Canada's Sudbury Neutrino Observatory looks cooler than any supervillain science lab. Its neutrino detector (above) is deeper than a mile underground, just for extra secret lair points. Oh, and the space it occupies is the largest manmade hole ever. CRACKED.COM — Source

29

This building looks like it's using advanced cloaking technology. But it's just really, really reflective. The building is Delaware State University's Optical Science Center for Applied Research, so it could be where people figure out how to cloak for real. CRACKED.COM

28

Brussels' Atomium is basically the perfect lair for an evil genius. It's a 335-foot-tall building, shaped like an iron molecule, that consists of massive halls (one inside each atom) linked by futuristic escalator tubes and elevators. In other words, exactly the headquarters that a megalomaniacal mad scientist would want. CRACKED.COM — Source

27

This isn't a hidden asteroid base, but an underground theme park.l It's Salina Turda, a former Romanian salt mine that got turned into a tourist trap with a mini golf course, spa center, underground lake boat rides, and even a Ferris wheel. Disappointingly, there are no secret spaceship hangars. CRACKED.COM — Source

26

Hellish mines in bizarre terrain are a sci-fi staple. This one's real. Eastern Indonesia's Ijen Crater is an active volcano where cracks in the rocks release poisonous gases that sometimes burn a strange blue color. Every day, people climb 9,000 feet and then descend 3,000 feet into the crater to mine elemental sulfur while it's hardening. CRACKED.COM — Source

25

This walkway would be at home in a cyberpunk movie. Sitting on top of the ARoS Kunstmuseum building, it offers great views of the city of Aarhus, Denmark. Well, if you don't mind seeing it in one color at a time. The designer says the tinted windows are there to make the inside and outside blur. CRACKED.COM — Source

24

South Africa's Mponeng gold mine is basically an underground dystopian slum. The 236 miles of tunnels in the 2.5-mile-deep mine (Earth's deepest) are home to a society of illegal ghost miners, armed with AK-47s, whose economy has everything from bread to sex workers. Security guards leave them be, because the complex is just so huge. CRACKED.COM — Source

23

In Slab City, California, it feels like the apocalypse came and went. In the '60s, RV owners passing through the Colorado desert flocked to slabs left over from a military base, and eventually built a Mad Max-like shantytown there. Slab City's 200-ish residents mostly have no water or power, but they do have churches, businesses, and a library. CRACKED.COM — Source

22

Want to see a rainforest 35 miles from Berlin? The Tropical Islands Resort is for you. The Resort is an enclosed dome that feels like a luxury biosphere on an alien planet. They also have a beach, hot air balloon rides, base jumping, and more. There are projected sunsets and fake sunlight too, strengthening the feeling of being in a high-end space resort. CRACKED.COM — Source

21

35 Top-Secret Locations You Need a Secret Knock or a Whole Lot of Money to Get Into — Source

20

Habitat 67 looks like it could turn into a giant robot. It's a housing complex of 354 cubes connected by walkways, elevator pillars, futuristic halls, plazas and more. Architect Moshe Safdie's idea was for the whole thing to house a model society (it was the '60s). Its resemblance to a Transformer is unintentional. CRACKED.COM — Source

19

Yup, this looks just like Colossus peeking out of a metal box. mao LIBAL LIFER It's a building on France's Polygone Riviera, a big shopping district. Somehow, someone thought the shiny head of Colossus from the X-Men would look perfect there. Sadly, there's no cool observatory - or anything else - inside the head. It just links the lower and upper floors. CRACKED.COM — Source

18

This looks like a sci-fi superweapon, but it's what used to be the world's biggest diamond mine. This Siberian mine was blasted open in the 1950s with explosives and jet engines, and the Russians just kept digging for years. (They closed it in 2004.) The mine acts like a superweapon, too. It's so big that helicopters can't fly over it because the downdraft would suck them inside. CRACKED.COM — Source

17

NOT 2018 TOSHIBA HAPPY NEW YEAS TOSHIBA «ТОК HAPPY NEW YEAR A major building in Times Square is empty. It's the building where they drop the New Year's Ball - One Times Square. There's one tenant: a Walgreens on the ground floor. The building has been used as a gigantic, vacant advertising stand since 1992. It makes $23 million a year. CRACKED.COM — Source

16

There are three tiny flagpoles on the Capitol. They're used for the Capitol Flag Program, through which you can buy flags flown over the Capitol. The flags fly on one of these flagpoles, not the real flagpole, for all of 30 seconds before they're packed and shipped. CRACKED.COM — Source

15

The clock tower Harry Potter flew over has a fancy apartment. Inside the St. Pancras clock tower, there's an apartment with ridiculously high ceilings and two bedrooms. Unfortunately, since it's literally on top of a train station, neither bedroom can give you a good night's sleep. CRACKED.COM — Source

14

The highest floor of the Empire State Building is reserved for a chosen few. The 103rd floor, which is so secret it's usually not listed, is only open to the rich and/or famous. It's a small observatory with 360-degree views. Almost no sounds reach it, so there's near-total silence. CRACKED.COM — Source

13

Disney World is hiding an abandoned island. Disney used it as a wildlife observatory, but shut it down in 1999 when they opened Animal Kingdom and moved all the animals there. Today, it's an overgrown jungle of empty animal cages, ruled by vultures (the actual kind, not the cartoon Disney kind). CRACKED.COM — Source

12

Underground tunnels criss-cross Los Angeles. They connect downtown LA's government buildings, and they're used for moving files securely. But they've also had other uses. For example, in the '50s and '60s, criminals were moved from jail to court through them. In 1960, a billion dollars of tax money were moved through them. CRACKED.COM — Source

11

There's a subway station under Grand Central Station. It led directly into the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, so the well-to-do wouldn't have to mingle with the masses. It was used from the '30s to the '60s, when it was abandoned (except for a 1965 party by Andy Warhol), and it was eventually totally closed off. CRACKED.COM — Source

10

There's a creepy secret chamber inside Mt. Rushmore. Its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wanted Mt. Rushmore to have a Hall of Records, where historic American documents would be stored. When he died in 1941, it was unfinished. In 1998, the government put a sealed titanium vault with copies of important documents in there. So he kinda got his wish. CRACKED.COM — Source

9

A luxury apartment sits at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Gustave Eiffel had it built for himself when the tower went up, and kept it secret for a long time. He'd get offered crazy sums for a night in it, but always said no. It didn't open to the public until 2015, 90 years after he died. CRACKED.COM — Source

8

Lake Erie lies above a massive salt mine. The mine is a three-mile-long complex that's so deep underground, fresh air has to be pumped in and miners have to carry an hour's worth of backup oxygen. Many of its sprawling tunnels are unexplored (and might be home to horrors that should not be awakened). CRACKED.COM — Source

7

The Washington Monument has a tiny, hidden twin. A 12-foot replica of the Monument is buried right next to it. It was built in the 1880s as a surveyor's tool-they'd use its scale to verify readings. The ground level rose over time, and the Mini Monument was encased in a tube, buried, and forgotten. CRACKED.COM — Source

6

A mini-scale rail network is laid under London. The London Post Office Railway is an adorable miniature underground tunnel system which, once upon a time, used automated trains to deliver mail around London. Today you can take a ride on the Mail Rail, and (presumably) glimpse the terrifying mole-men living in the tunnels. CRACKED.COM — Source

5

The Leaning Tower of Pisa contains an empty tube. The Tower of Pisa is actually a bell tower for the nearby cathedral, and there's literally nothing inside it. Aside from the ginormous bell, of course. CRACKED.COM — Source

4

Radio City Music Hall has a swanky apartment. Radio City built it for its first impresario, Samuel Roxy Rothafel, who had brought in a ton of top-shelf acts. It became his bachelor pad and party venue. And today, it could be yours - it's been kept in top shape, and is up for rent. CRACKED.COM — Source

3

Under the Lincoln Memorial, there's a cavern with dirty graffiti. The Memorial is kept up by support beams, which are in a Moria-esque underground hall. And the construction workers must have been really bored, because they left it full of graffiti that's a mix of porn doodles and dirty words. One just says boobies. CRACKED.COM — Source

2

People literally used to live in New York's public libraries. Back in the day, janitors had to keep books warm and dry with coal furnaces, which needed to be fueled with coal 24/7. So libraries had special apartments for janitors. Those apartments are abandoned today, since there's no money to renovate them. CRACKED.COM — Source

1

The Supreme Court also has a basketball court. Storage space above the courtroom was turned into a gym with a basketball court in the 1940s. John Roberts used to play basketball with William Rehnquist there, and Sandra Day O'Connor organized yoga classes in the gym every day. CRACKED.COM — Source

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