45 Amazing Places You Never Knew Existed

Beginning in 1922, mechanical engineer Elis F. Stenman began constructing his home out of traditional materials. When he got to the walls, he decided to try using newspaper. By the time he was done and moved out in 1930, the walls, furniture, and doors were fashioned out of 100,000 newspapers. The Paper House is now a museum that is tourable by donation.

Extending for about 300 miles along the western coast of Namibia is a treacherous, barren shoreline that has claimed over 1,000 ships. Aside from the abandoned hulls of boats, the wild coastline bears no other signs of civilization. Sand dunes tower up to 300 feet along the shore, and leopards, giraffes, and elephants can be seen navigating the sand and waves.

This Swedish hotel just outside the Arctic Circle, near the small, northern village of Harads, offers visitors a chance to stay in one of a variety of treehouse cottages, each designed by a different architect. The treehouses combine modernist and minimalist features and come in such eclectic designs as a birdnest, UFO, and reflective mirror cube.

Although it has been rebuilt multiple times, the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, was first erected in 1892 as a way to draw settlers to the self-proclaimed “Corn Capital of the World.” The concrete building’s exterior is decorated yearly with different murals made of corn ears and other grains and grasses.

The Darvaza gas crater, also known as the Door to Hell or the Gates of Hell, is a 230-foot wide hole in a natural gas drilling field that has been burning since 1971. The crater was formed when a Soviet drilling rig punctured a natural gas chamber and the ground collapsed under it, swallowing the rig. Fearing that poisonous gasses were being emitted, the workers lit the hole on fire — and it hasn’t stopped burning since.