Azerbaijan’s Khazar Islands was supposed to be a landmark new development featuring a huge 1,000m skyscraper.
What remains of this bold project, however, includes a number of unfinished buildings and undeveloped islands – a far cry away from the original plan.
Developers had envisaged an interconnected man-made chain of 55 artificial islands all joined by a variety of grand bridges.
Azerbaijan is a country bounded by the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains. It is a former Soviet republic that’s at the boundary of West Asia and Eastern Europe.
The country has seen a huge rise in wealth thanks to its large oil supply
The Khazar Islands could have been a crowning achievement for leaders in Baku, but the project has now come completely to a halt.
The plan for the Khazar Islands city development involved a major development that hoped to be home to one million residents that featured 50 hospitals and daycare centres, 150 schools, shopping malls, an array of parks, a yacht club, cultural centres, an equestrian centre, a university campus and even a Formula 1 racetrack.
The islands’ centrepiece was to be the Azerbaijan Tower, set to become the tallest building in the world.
The theory of the Khazar Islands was if it could work for Dubai’s Palm Island, then it could work for Azerbaijan, but this wasn’t so.
The Youtube channel MegaBuilds explains how Azerbaijan’s £80billion ($100billion) failed.
According to Megabuilds, the Azerbaijan Tower would be a business and office space with a wide range of luxury residential and hotel facilities.
The tower and all amenities were also set to be earthquake-proof.
The project looked to be completed in only 15 years with three phases with the first phase being the actual creation of the artificial islands.
Construction of residential development and the centrepiece tower was the second phase of this megaproject with the final phase being the round-up of all the remaining amenities and facilities in the area.
Construction of the islands began in 2011 despite the short timeline and the apparent lack of funds.
However once the project moved to the second phase, plans stalled with the project remaining a quiet memory today.
As the country was one of the biggest oil suppliers they were at the mercy of the resource’s market value.
Oil prices began to plummet for the rest of the world including Azerbaijan and hit the country’s GDP hard with a devalued currency that impacted the country’s megaproject plans.
The final blow for the Khazar Islands came with the arrest of the island’s visionary leader, Haji Ibrahim Nehramli, due to unpaid debts.
The construction of the tower and its islands were eventually cancelled altogether.
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