Children wearing bear fur costumes dance during a parade in Comanesti, Romania, Friday, December 30, 2022. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, toured from house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift speaks to a kid onstage during “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at Johan Cruijff Arena on July 04, 2024 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)

Grand banqueting halls, opulent lobbies and vast ballrooms; you could easily be forgiven for thinking this was a collection of photographs was documenting some of Europe’s grandest hotels. However, a closer look will reveal the majestic rooms to be engulfed in swathes of dust and moss; hotels that once hosted royals and high society abandoned to the elements. This is the latest result of urban exploration photography, going beyond “no entry” signs to capture images of dilapidated buildings across Europe. IT worker Thomas Windisch, from Graz in Austria, indulged his passion for photography by traveling across the continent, visiting over 100 abandoned hotels along the way. Here: inside a hotel in Austria. (Photo by Thomas Windisch/Caters News)

Merit Prize Winner: “A Well Earned Rest in the Sahara”. This photo of Moussa Macher, our Tuareg guide, was taken at the summit of Tin-Merzouga, the largest dune (or erg) in the Tadrat region of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria. Moussa rested while waiting for us to finish our 45-minute struggle to the top. It only took ten minutes of rolling, running, and jumping to get back down. The Tadrat is part of the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park World Heritage area, famous for its red sand and engravings and rock paintings of cattle, elephants, giraffes, and rhinos that lived there when the climate was milder. Photo location: Summit of Tin-Merzouga, Tadrat, Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Algeria. (Photo and caption by Evan Cole/National Geographic Photo Contest)

An adult female Masai giraffe rears on its hind legs as it resists efforts by Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) rangers to guide it into a transportation crate using ropes during an exercise to translocate large herbivores from Kedong Ranch due to land subdivisions and corralling that have disrupted wildlife migratory routes in Naivasha, Nakuru County, on November 16, 2025. Driven by two long ropes held by about twenty rangers, the blindfolded giraffe enters a tall trailer that is to transport it out of its natural habitat in the Rift Valley, which is deteriorating after having been resold. This is the first step in a meticulous relocation operation in the vast Kedong ranch, part of an ancestral corridor between Mount Longonot and Hell's Gate Park, near the iconic Lake Naivasha. (Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP Photo)

A year after hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto television screens worldwide, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of its poignant visibility. Reuters photographer, Antonio Bronic revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year's diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside. (Photo by Antonio Bronic/Reuters)

John Gourley leans out of the cab of Goliath, one of Europe's largest cranes on September 20, 2011 in Rosyth, Scotland. The crane will begin the assembly of the Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers later this week, when it lifts the first section of the two deck high 8,000 tonne centre block, which includes a section of the flight deck. The lift will mark the start of the Rosyth shipyards assembly of the first of two 65,000 tonne vessels the largest warships ever built for the Royal Navy. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Hot lava trickles down from the Stromboli volcano on August 9, 2014 in Aeolian Islands, Italy. Lava flows down the Mount Stromboli off the Sicilian coast in southern Italy. The volcano – at 3,034ft – is one of the most active in Europe and has been erupting continuously since 1932. (Photo by Tom Pfeiffer/Barcroft Media)