Large sheets of steel cover the windows and doors of practically every home and shop on the street. Layers of graffiti overlap across the walls. This is the “ghost town” of Doel in northern Belgium with a population of fewer than 20 people.
For decades a dwindling group of residents has lived among abandoned houses and boarded-up shops in the small town that was supposed to be demolished years ago.
Doel sits in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, located next to the sprawling port of Antwerp, the second busiest in Europe. There has been a question mark over the future of the small Flemish town for half a century because of authorities’ ambitions to expand the port.
An order was made in the late 1960s barring the construction of new homes in case the government needed to clear the town and acquire the land.
Around the same time, the nearby nuclear plant was being built. Three of the plant’s ageing nuclear reactors will be shut by the end of this year, with the final one to remain active for several more years.
Doel, a Belgian village that authorities thought would disappear. Photograph: Jack Power
Sometimes people assume Doel was emptied because of the neighbouring nuclear plant, but it was plans to develop Antwerp port that saw the regional government push people to leave.
There were about 1,300 residents in the 1970s. That number steadily declined due to the uncertainty about the town’s future, hollowing out the streets of redbrick houses.
The Flanders government, which governs the northern Flemish-speaking half of Belgium, finally proposed clearing Doel to make way for a new port development in 1998, offering to buy residents out of their homes. Most left.
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A small number stayed and launched a years-long legal battle that would ultimately see the plans to level the town halted. A truce was agreed between the government and locals in 2022, which led to amended plans for the expansion of Antwerp port that would allow Doel to remain on the map.
It was something of a pyrrhic victory for the group of residents who held out. A headcount in 2020 put the number of people still living in Doel at just 18.
Vegetation has grown over abandoned and crumbling buildings. You can still make out some of the faded and rusting signs above the doors of long-shuttered shops. The main landmark of the town, a church with a tall clock tower, is maintained regularly, its grounds kept tidy by volunteers.
Sabine Gillis (59), one the last remaining inhabitants of Doel. Photograph: Doel Festival.
“What is winning? Everybody has moved and the houses are destroyed,” says Sabine Gillis (59), one of the last remaining inhabitants. “The people that left, they don’t come back.”
Those who stayed have had serious problems with vandalism. People would break into vacant homes and smash up the interiors for fun.
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“In the beginning here it was beautiful,” Gillis says. Originally from Ghent, she moved to the town 20 years ago as part of a wave of “idealistic” and artistic types who created squats in some of the vacant homes and buildings.
Back then there were about 700 people living in Doel, between original residents and squatters. “I have seen enough [people] leave … I’m still here,” she says.
Doel, home to fewer than 20 people. Photograph: Jack Power
These days she doesn’t have much contact with the remaining residents.
During the Covid-19 pandemic Marc Van de Vijver, mayor of a nearby local district, complained about an influx of curious Belgians visiting Doel on day trips, disturbing the locals.
The town is also popular with tourists looking to explore sites of urban decay and taking photographs and videos for social media. Gates have been put up to restrict outsiders’ access during certain hours.
A field trip to Doel was a traditional feature of the syllabus for architecture students from Leuven university’s campus in Ghent, in northwest Belgium. Students would be brought to the area to practise their sketching skills by drawing the distinctive surroundings.
The idea was to ask students to “catch the soul of the place in drawings”, says Joris Van Reusel, an architecture professor in the university.
People in Doel, perhaps wondering how to catch the soul of the place. Photograph: François Walschaerts/AFP via Getty Images
Van Reusel took a trip out to the town by himself one Sunday afternoon in 2014 and came across a group of the remaining villagers socialising in the town’s only bar, in a building that used to be a school. He remembers looking around and thinking how brave these people were to have held on.
“Everybody was kind of done with the story of Doel, it was a given that the village was going to be lost,” he says.
That year his class of architecture students were tasked with a different project. “We tried to imagine another future for the village.”
The locals were not very welcoming at first, something Van Reusel felt was understandable. You hear the word architect and you think of people steamrollering in with big plans and “futuristic” ideas, he says.
But the residents gradually warmed to the students, many of whom became involved in the campaign to save Doel from being demolished. The school of architecture came up with a blueprint for how the slow decay of the town could be reversed.
The treatment of the people of Doel was a black mark on Belgium’s history, Van Reusel says. The Flemish administration had hoped living in the town would become impossible, forcing the last holdouts to leave, like “a candle that slowly fades out”, he says.
Graffiti on an abandoned house in Doel. Photograph: François Walschaerts/AFP via Getty Images
That changed when the plans to bulldoze the town to make way for the port’s expansion were scrapped in recent years. “There is still a future, but it will take time, maybe 20, 30, 40 years, to grow again from the ruins back to a living neighbourhood.”
Van Reusel says breathing new life into the place has to be done slowly and carefully. Nobody wants a property developer to come in and clear blocks of vacant buildings to build hundreds of new houses or apartments.
The 400-year-old town is located on a polder, which is land reclaimed from the Scheldt river that runs from the sea through Antwerp and down into northern France.
The gradual redevelopment and restoration of dilapidated homes should retain the historic fabric of the town, Van Reusel says.
“You need to grow a community like a slow growing crop and this takes time.” It was important to push back against the perception Doel was an abandoned ghost town or a “dead village”.
People walking past abandoned in Doel near the city of Antwerp. Photograph: François Walschaerts/AFP via Getty Images
Last year, the Flemish government approved a scheme that would see some former homeowners, or their relatives, offered a chance to buy back their old properties in the town from a company that manages the port and surrounding lands.
The first phase of that plan saw 15 homes in the centre of the town offered to people, but uptake was low. “Only one person exercised the right of retransfer,” a spokesman for the port company says.
Still, that new arrival, with a young family, has encouraged campaigners who are hopeful of reversing the town’s decline. Others are more sceptical.
“I don’t think the people from the past will come back”, says Gillis. Doel holds painful memories for former residents and homeowners who built new lives elsewhere.
Remarkably after all these years Gillis is still squatting in one of the homes. She lives with her two dogs, Babs and Misty.
The house has not had running water for 12 years, so three times a week she travels to a swimming pool to shower. She is able to fill up a large container of water in a neighbour’s home and collects rainwater as well. “They were thinking in the past if we cut the water she will move, but they had the wrong person,” she says of the authorities.
There is one day during the year where residents let several thousand people into the town. Doel has – somewhat bizarrely – become the site of an electronic music festival.
Gilles De Decker, a 43-year-old festival organiser from Brussels, was given the idea during the pandemic by a club promoter in Antwerp. “Doel is quite a famous place. I remember in the 90s there was the fight going on between the residents and the government and the port,” he says.
De Decker, who runs another festival, Paradise City, liked the thought of putting something on in such a fascinating location. “It’s a place where time stood still,” he says.
The one-day festival has been running for four years. The most recent edition this August sold about 5,500 tickets, he says. It pulls in a crowd from nearby Antwerp, but also Brussels and other parts of Belgium, with shuttle buses running from the cities to the isolated town.
Temporary stages for the DJ sets are constructed across the town; one in the middle of a street, another in a larger open green space, some in walkways, and one in what looks like an abandoned garage.
Once a year a small electronic music festival is held in Doel, taking over the town. Photograph: Jack Power
It wasn’t easy to get residents to agree to let the organisers stage an electronic festival in the town. “In the beginning we had a lot of opposition from the original, older inhabitants, who were a bit more conservative,” De Decker says.
They eventually came around. The organisers sort alternative accommodation for some of the locals for the day, including Gillis and her two dogs.
The festival is part of the push to revive Doel, “while looking at the past and respecting what happened here”, De Decker says.
After two decades living in a town that has slowly fallen apart around her, Gillis is not optimistic about Doel’s future. “They are talking about rebuilding, I’m not sure.”
She sometimes travels to Greece for a couple of months during the winter, where she has friends. More and more she finds herself thinking about leaving Doel and moving there permanently.
“I have had enough of this place,” she says.