Abandoned places have an alluring appeal to those with a taste for adventure and mystery.

The sense of the unknown can be both exhilarating and terrifying, allowing the imagination to run wild.

Exploring them allows you to travel back to the past and experience a world long forgotten by time.

One such intriguing place is a former tourist hotspot in South America that has been deserted for 40 years.

Villa Epecuén was a tourist village located on the shore of a lake, in the countryside near Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires.

In its heyday it was a popular destination for the capital city’s residents, keen to bathe in the lake’s therapeutic salty waters.

The village, whose inhabitants numbered 1,500, could accommodate up to 5,000 visitors.

However, the village’s fortunes nosedived in November 1985, when a freak storm caused a dam and dike to burst.

The village was rapidly flooded with waters reaching a depth of 10 metres at the height of the crisis.

Locals were forced to flee the devastating floods and rebuild their lives elsewhere, as the village was submerged and was thought to be lost forever

Incredibly, though, it started to reappear after the flood waters began receding almost 25 years later in 2009.

Slowly but surely, old buildings along with rusting vehicles and the trunks of dead trees began to emerge from the water’s depths, reminding people of a once prosperous past.

Only one person ventured back to live in the village – 81-year-old Pablo Novak.

Apart from Pablo, the only others to make their way to Villa Epecuén are curious tourists.

The village has become famous thanks to a number of TV programmes.

It was featured in the TV shows Abandoned Engineering and Mysteries of the Abandoned.

The former resort was also used as a location in the 2010 film And Soon the Darkness, starring Amber Heard and Karl Urban.