Lavasa was promoted as India’s first privately built, planned hill city — a Mediterranean-style resort town rising on seven hills near Pune in Maharashtra, modeled visually on the Italian fishing village of Portofino. Developed by Lavasa Corporation Limited, a subsidiary of Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), it was conceived in the early 2000s and unveiled publicly around 2006 as a master-planned settlement of four or five towns intended ultimately to house 200,000 to 300,000 people, complete with lakefront promenades, colorful facades, hotels, schools, and education and tourism hubs.
Only the first town, Dasve, was substantially built. By around 2011 it featured cobbled waterfront walkways, four hotels, a town center, a hospitality college (Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa), and a school, drawing weekend tourists and a small resident base. But the wider city never materialized. On 25 November 2010 India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a stop-work order, finding that Lavasa had proceeded without required environmental clearances, that large-scale hill cutting had scarred the slopes and risked landslides, and that construction had encroached near the Warasgaon reservoir. The order froze the flagship development for roughly a year.
The halt, costly delays, and weak sales left the project unable to service the debt taken on to build it. Although clearance was conditionally restored in November 2011, momentum was gone. By 2018 the developer was insolvent: on 30 August 2018 the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) admitted Lavasa Corporation to insolvency, with admitted creditor claims eventually reaching roughly Rs 6,642 crore. HCC, for its part, had written off its entire investment in the project. What had been pitched as a futuristic private city became a half-built shell of one town surrounded by unrealized master plans.
The insolvency has dragged on without resolution. In July 2023 the NCLT approved a Rs 1,814 crore resolution plan from Darwin Platform Infrastructure Limited (DPIL), raising hopes of a revival. But DPIL failed to make the required upfront payments, and on 6 September 2024 the NCLT scrapped its plan and ordered the insolvency process restarted from scratch under a new resolution professional. Fresh bidders emerged through 2025 amid disputes from more than 500 aggrieved homebuyers, leaving Lavasa, two decades after its launch, a scenic but largely abandoned and legally contested project.
In the hills of Bolu Province in northwestern Turkey, near the historic town of Mudurnu, the Sarot Group — a venture of the Istanbul construction entrepreneurs the Yerdelen brothers — began raising one of the strangest landscapes in modern real estate: hundreds of nearly identical miniature French-style châteaux, each three storeys high with steep grey turrets and tidy balconies, marching in dense, repetitive rows across a valley fed by natural thermal springs. Marketed under the name Burj Al Babas, the gated estate was conceived as a luxury second-home community complete with a planned spa and leisure facilities, aimed largely at affluent Gulf buyers seeking a cool, green Turkish retreat.
The project’s economics rested on cloning at scale. By replicating a single château design across a planned 732 villas — priced roughly between $370,000 and $530,000 each — the developer aimed to deliver an instantly recognizable ‘fairy-tale’ enclave quickly and cheaply, with a total investment cited around $200 million. Early sales were brisk, with roughly half the units reportedly presold, many to buyers in Kuwait. Around 587 villas were built before the model collapsed. The result, photographed and shared around the world, was uncanny: street after street of identical pointed-roof palaces, none of them occupied, looking less like a neighborhood than a film set glitching across a hillside.
The collapse came as Turkey’s currency crisis struck in 2018, when the lira plunged in value, construction costs climbed and the financing math fell apart while demand from the Gulf — the narrow buyer pool the project had staked everything on — softened. The developer sought concordat protection from its creditors in 2018, and a court declared the company bankrupt that November; a year later, in 2019, the bankruptcy was reversed after roughly half the debt was discharged and permission was granted to resume work. But construction never meaningfully restarted, and the rows of half-finished châteaux stood empty.
In the years since, Burj Al Babas has become a global shorthand for stalled luxury speculation. Its very design — the mass repetition meant to make it efficient — made it almost impossible to salvage, and its legal afterlife has been tangled: a 2022 ruling reportedly found the group ‘comfortably in credit,’ while a fraud trial later targeted Sarot executives over sales that allegedly continued even after bankruptcy protection. In 2024 the matter reached the highest levels, with Kuwait’s emir raising aggrieved buyers’ complaints with Turkey’s president and the Yerdelen and Sarot companies placed under a Turkish state fund. Through it all the eerie, uniform ghost estate has gained no meaningful occupancy.