Emerald Summer Camp
база отдыха Изумрудный
‘Emerald Summer Camp’ or in Russian, ‘база отдыха Изумрудный’, was a children’s holiday camp inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine.
The holiday camp is hidden in the forest located on the banks of the cooling pond of the Chernobyl Power Plant. You can find the camp behind the village of Lelev and the Checkpoint of the ten kilometer Exclusion Zone. Before the disaster, children of the military families, living the secret military town of Chernobyl-2, and the personnel of the Nuclear Power Plant were enjoying holidays here. In fact it was a quiet place to relax, with clean air and beautiful scenery.
Cartoon and fairy-tale characters
The camp has more than hundred wooden huts with bright colored murals showing cartoon and fairy-tale characters. The camp offered guests a library, ballroom, boat station, cinema and shop. In the center of the park is a big metal water tower.
Liquidators
After the Chernobyl disaster, the Emerald camp was not abandoned immediately. During the liquidation work at the Power Plant, the recreation center was used for the housing of the liquidators. I visited the camp during my trip in 2015. ‘Emerald Summer Camp’ was eventually burned down during the big forest fires in 2020. Today nothing reminds us of the summer camp anymore.
‘Emerald Summer Camp’ or ‘база отдыха Изумрудный’. 
The water tower at the camp. 
A rusty swing reminds us of better times. 
Colorful gnomes at hut ’50’. 
Inside one of the derelict huts. 
The abandoned summer camp. 
Inside one of the summer houses. 
Decay and nature is taking over. 
The lions and the turtle. 
Children from Pripyat spend the summer here. 
The derelict Summer Camp. 
‘Kino’. 
Mural art on the movie theater. 
The movie theater collapsed years ago. 
More Soviet mural art. 
One of the decaying huts at Emerald. 
A quiet place to relax, with clean air and beautiful scenery. 
The camp was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster. 
Mickey in Soviet style. 
‘Emerald Summer Camp’. 
The children’s slide. 
A house at the abandoned summer camp. 
Information panels at the entrance. 
Warning!
