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Doel has a reputation as Belgium’s best-known ghost town. But its few inhabitants – numbering just 21 – now see a glimmer of hope of their village bouncing back to life.<\/h3>\nDoel has a reputation as Belgium’s best-known ghost town. But its few inhabitants – numbering just 21 – now see a glimmer of hope of their village bouncing back to life.<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
RTE News writes:<\/p>\n
Doel has a reputation as Belgium’s best-known ghost town. But its few inhabitants – numbering just 21 – now see a glimmer of hope of their village bouncing back to life.<\/p>\n
If it does, it would be a remarkable change of fortune for a place that has been steadily emptying out since the late 1970s when its population was 60 times bigger, leaving behind silent streets of crumbling, sealed-up homes covered in graffiti.<\/p>\n
Squeezed between Antwerp’s ever-expanding port – the second-biggest in Europe – and a nuclear power plant, Doel has become a morbid attraction….<\/p>\n
Police patrol regularly to prevent vandals and squatters moving in…<\/p>\n
Only two cafes – one attached to a 17th-century windmill – and an immaculate parish church remind visitors that the village still holds out….<\/p>\n
But Doel’s fate hit the skids in the late 1990s when Belgian authorities decided to expropriate and bulldoze villages around Antwerp’s port to build a new container dock…<\/p>\n
But in 2016, Belgium’s supreme court shot down the expansion plan, after the European Court of Justice ruled that it threatened Doel’s marshland surroundings and the ecology of the Scheldt river that runs alongside it…..<\/p>\n
“I really hope they evolve in the direction that Doel becomes a normal village, together with its scars, of course – they will always be visible, the scars of this recent past,” Ms Stuer said, standing in the garden of her house a short distance from the nuclear plant.<\/p>\n