August 23, 2020

Tour Report: Villa "Roadside"

Since late 2013, I had tried to find a way into this abandoned villa at least once or twice a year - yet everytime I was there, there was no access, and we had to go home or drive on to the next location. There had never been any photos on any platform that I know of - it seemed like this house was never going to let us in.

I'd made the same experience with another location closer to home. That one as well was inaccessible for years - until a certain group of so-called "urbexers", that gained (a little) fame by promoting unspectacular locations with (mostly more than exaggerated) spectacular stories, had suddenly "found" a way in.

Normally, I wouldn't find this suspicious, but that one was only one in a small series of locations that had been known to be inaccessible for years and - possibly by pure chance or fate - everyone of those houses had a broken window or door just as soon as these guys went to "check it out".

The abandoned villa was no different, and I do find it suspicious if people check the place out for five years - and then the "lucky guys" show up and oops! there is a broken window....

It's an ambivalent thing - on the one hand "real" urbexers are depending on vandals, copper thieves, squatters etc. to generate an access - but on the other hand, a real urbexer would never use force to enter a building.

In this case, I do think that the guys I'm talking about are using force to get into the buildings in order to be able to keep up a regular flow of "spectacular" videos on Youtube. In fact, they were sued for illegally entering an "abandoned" airport - only it wasn't really abandoned... After that, they posted various videos explaining themselves and saying (almost) nothing they did was illegal etc. etc.

I am sorry; this post was not supposed to be about the idiots that are spawning around the hobby of urban exploration, but I had to get this off my chest.

We visited this location together with our friend Pixelcracker in March of 2018. We had already explored an abandoned hotel that had formerly been a garrison of the East German border troops and since I had seen that the aforementioned "guys" had been to the villa by the road, I thought, why not check it out.

And I was right - there was a broken window at almost the exact same spot on the back of the building that I had found in the other villa which had no access for at least five years - what a surprise! But we were in. And I was happy that after five years, I finally got the chance to check the place out, even though there was sort of a bad aftertaste...

Since it hadn't been accessible for long, the vandalism and decoration hadn't really started yet. But we got a first-hand look and feel what happens when a location is "open". Towards the end of our explore, two guys came togehter with a "model", behaved like they owned the place and as we left, went upstairs and began rearranging the furniture. 

Over the more than two years since our visit, I have seen more photos from this location pop up over the internet, but they mostly looked like threre hadn't been too much vandalism yet (although a few things have apparently been stolen), and I truly hope that it's going to stay that way and that someone is going to rescue the place!


To find out a bit about the history of the place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.


















































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