Steel Company R.

In August of last year, my wife and I went to Denmark for her family's biennial reunuion. Last year, it took place on the island of Fyn.
Before we made our way up there, I contacted an urbex colleague in Denmark if he had an idea where in the region I could find some worthwile spots.
Normally I don't ask other people for locations, because the searching (and the finding!) of the spots to me are an important part of the hobby. But in this case, the language barrier is too high for me to do any successful searching over the usual channels, because the usual translation tools are really having a hard time with the Danish language...
Anyway, the guy in Denmark was really nice and gave me a couple of tips, and this was one of them.
It was only about twenty or thirty kilometers from the place of the familiy meeting, so on the second afternoon, my wife and I took the chance and got away from the family for a while. The factory buildings are in the middle of a small rural settlement with a couple of homes around. It was the weekend, so we parked a little hidden on the driveway of another company nearby and walked the rest of the way. We had checked for an appropriate entry route in advance, but that led us right past one of the neighboring houses. So we ducked and snuck past the shrubs in front of the house and dove through the gate on the steel company's premises.
We made our way through the high grass along the building walls until we found a way into an adjacent hall. The only door into the factory had been walled shut, but there was a hole in the wall - something like a service hatch - through which we finally got in...
On one of my later explorations there, a friend of mine found out that the front door was open...but that's another story for another post...
I cant't be sure when this company was abandoned. Some files in the offices that I discovered later date back to 2009, but some of the calendars and other stuff in the actual production halls suggest that the production seized as early as 1999.
The shape this place was in is amazing. There is no vandalism whatsoever (although we learned on a later expedition that there are some teenagers in the area that are slowly starting to discover the place as a party spot...), no graffiti and no metal thieves.
Highlight in this first exploration of this place was of course the dusty Porsche 944 that we discovered. It probably belonged to the owner and became part of the insolvency estate.
Well, after about one and a half hours we had to go on back to the family reunion, but this short excursion was a nice diversion from the usual family "routine" :)


To find out more about the history of this gem and to check out all the photos from this great spot, click the button below.

Chateau K.

This one was the last spot on our summer tour last year, and it was a really nice explore as well. Originally more of an alternative, it turned out to be a little gem for my wife and me.
After we had finished exploring the mill and the mill owner's villa, we drove a little while to a small old town.
I had found some information on a mansion there that was built around the turn of the 20th century as an "optical upgrade" from a large farm hous or estate house, something which I understand was a very fashionable thing to do at the time.
The really "funny" part about the history of this "castle" however came up after the tour, when I found out that a former "owner" actually had worked for me as a call center agent!! And he was selling fake nobility titles!!!
Anyway, we drove up to the castle and found a public parking spot conveniently close to the park surrounding the building. The location was at the end of a street with not many neighbors and it was pretts overgrown, so we started our first walk around and found an open window at the back right away, and we climbed inside.
Inside we found that the masnion was mostly empty, but there was hardly any vandalism as well. The afternoon sun made for a spectacular light in the large hall, which became one of my favorute shots from the entire tour.


To find out more about the history of this castle - and the whole story behind the criminal mastermind who owned it - and to check out all the photos from this great spot, click the button below.

The Factory Owner's Villa

As I've said in the last post, we not only met "the guy with the dog" on the premises of the old mill works, but also two guys that were working as structural engineers who were evaluating the static integrity of the factory owner's villa.
We had a little chat with one of them in which he warned us about some rooms in the villa and told us a story about some photographers that broke through a floor like two weeks earlier.

Of course, we did check out the villa after the guys had left.
There wasn't much to see at all, but as always, some photos came out pretty okay ;)

The russian letters on the wall are remains from a movie shoot for German television a couple of years back.

To find out more about the history of this villa and to check out all the photos from this great spot, click the button below.