If you’ve ever traveled, you’ve probably stayed at a hotel. And while the hotel wasn’t as fancy as a Four Seasons, it still was decent.

But now, imagine the best, grandest, most amazingest [sic] hotel ever constructed to the likes of man.

Got it yet?

The Ryugyong Hotel, located in East Asia, is a hotel that is 1,080 feet tall and shaped like a pyramid. Even though it’s intended as a mixed-use place, it includes a hotel, along with five rotating restaurants. Each restaurant serves food that is truly a cut above the rest, and so are the many, many, many rooms in its three wings. It, apparently, is also an apartment building! Now, would you want to go there?

You probably would! But, there’s only one, tiny, insignificant catch:

It’s completely empty.

Yes, you read that right. Ryugyong Hotel is completely empty on the inside because there was no funding for it. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the hotel, which had its construction begin in 1987, stopped in 1992 because there was no Soviet funding for the hotel to survive.

Did I mention it’s in North Korea?

Well, if it were finished, it’d be the tallest hotel in the world, and (until 2015) it was the tallest unoccupied building. The construction was estimated to take up 2% of North Korea’s GDP, which, if you think about it, is a lot for one building!

In 2008, construction resumed by an Egyptian company, and North Korean officials said they’d have it complete by 2012, or on the 100th anniversary of former North Korean president Kim Il Sung’s birthday. The exterior was finished in 2011, but the inside was still yet to be completed with all those lavish promises above.

The opening date was pushed to mid-2013, but in March of that year, they canceled the project. Since then, the building remained unoccupied, but it has been put to use since 2018 in broadcasting propaganda messages and showing movies. In 2024, an offer to occupy the building with a casino has been made, but it still isn’t confirmed yet.

So that ends our story of the Ryugyong Hotel, a hotel deemed an eyesore even by the government itself, which begs the question:

WHY DON’T YOU TEAR IT DOWN?!

You’ve got other ways to show movies and cannot run out of ways to broadcast propaganda!