How to Make Sense of an Undrowned Town

January 20, 2020 5:25 PM

Residents of Celles in France were evicted so their village could be flooded. Then, it wasn’t.
posted by cynical pinnacle (10 comments total)

This reminds me of the parking lot by my volunteer job, which they blocked off and refused to let anyone park in (and yet, did nothing in the space) for like three years before finally ripping it all up this year.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:55 PM on January 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Huh, one of the photos contains a piece of street art from the artist Jérôme Mesnager. Funny to see his work turn up here. He lives in Montreuil, just next to Paris, but does travel to put his works up all over the place. Including apparently abandoned towns that just might turn up in an article photoshoot.
posted by Nelson at 6:19 PM on January 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

and in Italy
posted by growabrain at 12:08 AM on January 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Wow, great story (in the end). Sounds like they have a good vision for the future of the rebuilt community.

And who better than a former punk with family links to the village, to lead the revival?

Also, what's not to like about being evicted, then returning to a picturesque waterfront?

Aside from the pointless eviction part, of course.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:11 AM on January 21, 2020

See Library Booklists: Drowned Towns for towns (real or fictional) that were flooded.
posted by pracowity at 2:52 AM on January 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

They did something similar on the New Jersey - PA border with the aborted Tock's Island Dam project. The Army Corp of Engineers took over and demolish a few whole towns near the Delaware Water Gap in the 1960s before activists finally got the project shut down.
posted by octothorpe at 7:07 AM on January 21, 2020

In Spain evicting people to create impoundments reached epidemic proportions. A huge percentage of the villages in this blog were victims of this. Most are still uninhabited.
posted by garbanzilla at 8:02 AM on January 21, 2020

We have friends who run a guinguette and kayak rental on that lake. It is nice and there are some flooded buildings, but I guess not in this town.
posted by snofoam at 10:54 AM on January 21, 2020

Octothorpe, I lived there for a bit in the late 90s; the environmental education center I was working at somehow got permission to use one of the remaining buildings as housing for interns. It was deeply spooky.
posted by metasarah at 11:19 AM on January 24, 2020

So it's come to this already?
posted by sneebler at 2:22 PM on January 26, 2020