Izumrudnoye Recreation Center

Izumrudnoye recreation center is an abandoned Young Pioneer camp in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine, on the shore of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's cooling pond, near the former village of Lelev, amid a pine forest. Before the 1986 accident, the camp was a popular holiday spot for military personnel and their families from the closed town of Chernobyl-2, nuclear plant employees and other privileged guests.

What used to be here

The camp grounds held about a hundred wooden summer cabins decorated with bright paintings of fairy-tale and cartoon characters, including Disney characters. There was also a shop, a cinema, a dance hall and a boat station.

The camp was not abandoned right after the accident: for some time it housed teams of liquidators, after whom respirators and other items can still be found in the surrounding area.

Today

It is no longer possible to visit Izumrudnoye: in April 2020, large wildfires swept through the exclusion zone and destroyed almost all the camp's wooden buildings — only a few brick structures and the metal frames of swings survived. The same fire badly damaged the neighboring village of Lelev. While the camp was still accessible, it drew tourists and fans of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R., many of whom recognized Izumrudnoye as the prototype for one of the game's locations.

Lelev and the cooling pond

The village of Lelev, next to which the camp stands, was fully resettled and deregistered in 1999; its residents were moved to the village of Nedra in the Baryshivsky District of Kyiv Oblast (according to Wikipedia). The cooling pond of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, on whose shore the camp is located, is an artificial reservoir of about 23 km² on the Pripyat floodplain, built to cool the plant; between 2014 and 2019, as the plant was decommissioned, the pond's level was gradually lowered to its design level, but the reservoir still exists today (according to the Chernobyl NPP website, chnpp.gov.ua).