Emerald Summer Camp

‘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 in 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.

The camp has more than a 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.

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.