The ruin of a giant Gulliver being captured by the people of Lilliput at Japan’s dormant Gulliver’s Kingdom. The theme park, based on Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels, was built near Mount Fuji close to Aokigahara forest, a place associated in Japanese mythology with demons. Photograph: Hiroyuki Tsuzuki/Hiroyuki Tsuzuki
Bumper cars lay beached, overgrown with weeds, at a fairground in the once-thriving Soviet city of Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine. The area has been officially closed off to human habitation since the nuclear power plant disaster in 1986 Photograph: Alamy
Shells of dolphin rides poke through vines, and a disused rollercoaster lays on its side at an abandoned amusement park in Nyarutarama, an area of Kigali, Rwanda. Photograph: Stephen Abbott Pugh
The duck rollercoaster ride at Okpo Land, a once popular amusement park in South Korea. The site was open for around 20 years before closing in the 90s after fatalities on the rides. It has since been demolished. Photograph: Steve Smash/Flickr
The haunting skeleton of the Screw Coaster looming in the mist at the Nara Dreamland theme park in Japan. The park was built in 1961 as Japan’s answer to Disneyland, but shut down in 2006 and has been left to rot ever since. Photograph: Delphine Adburgham/Alamy
The flooded remains of the Six Flags New Orleans amusement park in eastern New Orleans, which has been abandoned since Hurricane Katrina devastated the area in 2005. Photograph: David J. Phillip/AP
A toy car lost in the undergrowth in Berlin’s Spreepark. The site has been popular amongst urban explorers and opens occasionally for one-off events. British band the xx put on a festival on the grounds in 2013 and scenes for 2011 thriller Hanna were filmed there. Photograph: Ciaran Fahey
The graffiti-covered remains of a T.rex model and Ferris wheel in Berlin’s Spreepark, which in its heyday as East Berlin’s only amusement park would see up to 1.5m visitors a year. It shut in 2001, after the owners were imprisoned for an ill-fated attempt to smuggle 180kg of cocaine back from Peru in the mast of a flying carpet ride. Photograph: Ciaran Fahey