Chernobyl is the name of the worst nuclear disaster in history and, today, of a territory unlike any other on the planet: the Exclusion Zone, an area of about 2,600 km² around the nuclear power plant that exploded on 26 April 1986, evacuated for good and turned into a place of silence, remembrance and nature reclaimed. Inside it lies Pripyat, the ghost town that housed the plant's workers, abandoned overnight and frozen in the Soviet Union of the 1980s.
Important: this guide is different from the others. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is CLOSED to visitors. The tours, which before the pandemic drew tens of thousands of curious visitors a year, were suspended with COVID and, above all, with the Russian invasion of February 2022, when Russian troops occupied the zone for weeks; access permits are suspended for as long as martial law lasts. That is why we treat Chernobyl soberly, as a historical event and a place of remembrance —for the victims of the disaster and for the liquidators who gave their lives to contain the radiation—, and not as a tourist destination you can go to today.
This guide explains what the 1986 disaster was, what the Exclusion Zone holds and how you can learn its history responsibly: through the excellent National Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv, documentaries, books and virtual tours, while waiting for a future in which the zone, at peace, can be visited again safely and respectfully. Any information on access, prices or services is currently altered or suspended because of the war.
On 26 April 1986, during a badly executed safety test, reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant suffered an explosion and a fire that released huge amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, contaminating large areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and reaching much of Europe to a lesser extent. It was the worst nuclear accident in history. The Soviet authorities initially hid the scale of the disaster; the neighbouring town of Pripyat was only evacuated the following day, and an Exclusion Zone was later set up from which more than 100,000 people left. Thousands of 'liquidators' —firefighters, soldiers, miners, workers— laboured in extreme conditions to put out the fire and bury the reactor under a concrete 'sarcophagus', many at the cost of their health or their lives. In 2016 a new steel confinement was completed over the ruins. The disaster hastened the discrediting of the Soviet regime. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Ukraine: Kyiv, the thousand-year-old “mother of Rus' cities” on the Dnieper; the Chernobyl exclusion zone; Uman, the city of Hasidic pilgrims; and Poltava, site of the battle that changed Eastern Europe.
Read the history of Kyiv and the centre →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it became a byword for catastrophe, Chernobyl (Chornobyl) was a small, old town in northern Ukraine. It was already mentioned in the 12th century, had a long history and, before the 20th century, a notable Jewish and Hasidic community. According to some interpretations, its name comes from a local plant, a kind of mugwort. Nothing about that quiet town on the banks of the Pripyat River hinted at the part it would play in world history.
Everything changed in the 1970s. The Soviet Union chose the area to build a large nuclear power plant, the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin plant. It was a symbol of Soviet technological pride and a key part of the Ukrainian republic's electricity supply. A few kilometres away, a brand-new model city was built to house the workers. This was Pripyat, founded in 1970: a planned, modern and privileged 'atomgrad' (atomic city).
Pripyat embodied the Soviet ideal of progress. It had spacious apartment blocks, schools, a hospital, cinemas, a swimming pool, a palace of culture and even a shiny new amusement park. Its population of around 50,000 was young, with an average age of about 26, and its standard of living was higher than the Soviet average. New reactors were being added to the plant, and life looked promising. That whole world would collapse in a single night in April 1986.
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, the operators of reactor number 4 were running a safety test. They wanted to see how the system would respond to a power cut. The test went disastrously wrong. Safety systems had been switched off and the reactor was left unstable at low power. Then a fatal mix of human error and serious flaws in the reactor's design set off the tragedy. The reactor was an RBMK, a type prone to uncontrollable power surges.
At 01:23, the reactor's power shot up violently within seconds. Two explosions in quick succession blew off the reactor lid, which weighed thousands of tonnes, wrecked the building and threw pieces of the red-hot core into the air. The reactor's graphite caught fire. A column of smoke and radioactive particles rose from the ruins into the atmosphere and was carried off by the wind. It was the start of the worst nuclear accident in history.
Firefighters were the first to arrive. They came to put out the fires without knowing what they were facing, and with no protection from the lethal radiation coming off the debris. Many of these first responders died in the following weeks from acute radiation syndrome. Meanwhile, a few kilometres away, the people of Pripyat slept, with no idea that the air they were breathing had turned deadly.
The Soviet authorities' first reaction was to cover it up. For hours and days, they played down the scale of the disaster, both to their own people and to the world. Life in Pripyat carried on as normal for almost a day and a half. Children played in the streets under extremely high radiation while local officials waited for orders from Moscow.
The evacuation of Pripyat did not begin until the afternoon of 27 April, about 36 hours after the explosion. Within a few hours, a fleet of more than a thousand buses took the whole population out of the city. People were told they would only be away for a few days and to leave almost everything behind. They never came back. Over the following days and weeks, the evacuation was extended to a 30-kilometre radius and beyond. In all, more than 100,000 people were forced from their homes, and the Exclusion Zone was created.
The world found out about the catastrophe almost by accident. On 28 April, detectors at a nuclear power plant in Sweden picked up abnormal levels of radiation, which forced the USSR to admit publicly that something had happened. By then the radioactive cloud was already spreading over Europe. The secretive handling of the disaster came at the height of the 'glasnost' (openness) promised by Gorbachev, and it did lasting damage to the Soviet regime's credibility.
Containing the disaster took a mobilisation on a scale never seen before. Over the following months and years, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to the area: firefighters, soldiers, miners, engineers, labourers and scientists. Their job was to fight the fire, clear the radioactive debris and seal the reactor. They are the 'liquidators', and they became the heroic and tragic face of Chernobyl.
Their work was extreme. Helicopters dropped thousands of tonnes of sand, lead and boron onto the burning reactor. Miners dug a tunnel underneath it to stop the molten fuel from reaching the groundwater. On the contaminated roof, the radiation made robots break down, so men did the job instead. Known as 'bio-robots', they cleared pieces of graphite by hand in shifts lasting only seconds, exposed to brutal doses. Many liquidators went on to suffer serious health problems, and some died young.
Between May and November 1986, an enormous concrete and steel 'sarcophagus' was built at top speed to enclose the destroyed reactor and stop the radiation leak. It was an emergency fix, meant to last a few decades, and over the years it began to crack. So between 2010 and 2016, with international funding, the New Safe Confinement was built. It is a gigantic steel arch that was slid over the old sarcophagus to seal the site for at least a century. The memory of the liquidators, 'the ones who saved the world', is now central to how the disaster is commemorated.
Almost four decades later, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still a unique place. Pripyat remains abandoned and is slowly being swallowed by vegetation. Its rusty Ferris wheel has become a worldwide icon of abandonment. The plant no longer produces electricity, as its last reactor was shut down in 2000. Only the staff who manage the radioactive legacy under the new confinement work there now.
Ironically, the absence of people turned the zone into an accidental wildlife sanctuary. Wolves, elk, wild boar, lynx and even Przewalski's horses thrive among the forests and empty villages. In 2016, a large part of the area was declared a Biosphere Reserve. During the 2010s, Chernobyl also opened up to memorial tourism. Tens of thousands of visitors a year toured the zone on authorised tours, a trend also driven by documentaries, video games and the hit 2019 television series.
The Russian invasion of 2022 wrote an unexpected new chapter. On 24 February, Russian troops advancing from Belarus occupied the plant and the Exclusion Zone and held the staff there for weeks. Military vehicles churned up contaminated soil, and power cuts raised fears for the safety of the facilities. Russian forces withdrew at the end of March 2022. Since then the zone has been closed to visitors and tours have been suspended. Chernobyl remains what it always was: a place of memory for one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. In a country at war, it is now waiting for a future in which it can be visited again safely and respectfully.
