Bastnäs is an ancient Swedish ore field hidden deep in the forest that’s famous for two things: the discovery of the chemical element Cerium in 1803, and the at least 1,000 cars that are hiding behind the trees there since the early fifties.
Unlike the infamous car dumpster in Belgium, the birth of the Bastnäs scrapyard had everything to do with the servicemen who left their cars behind after the Second World War Sweden switching from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right in 1967.
You see, Bastnäs is in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also on the Swedish/Norwegian border and just 70 miles from the Norwegian capital, Oslo.
The two brothers collected all those cars to sell parts on the other side of the border, and did just that successfully up until the eighties.
To keep the gig running, they also kept buying more cars and ran the business from a house built in a field surrounded by the remains of all those abandoned Saabs, Volvos, Fords, Sunbeams, Buicks, Volkswagens, Opels, Fiats and various other makes. Unfortunately, the dense forest kept taking over the place isolating cars in its way, and after almost four decades, nature finally won the unfair game.
One of the owners left the place for good in the early nineties, but his brother was still around in 2010, claiming that up to 1,000 cars could be there despite him selling roughly 250 the previous year.
Those in the scrap metal business say the collection is worth about $150K without taking the parts into consideration, but Båstnäs is so far from civilization that most of those cars are unlikely to make a move anytime soon.
In order to save something special from there, you’ll only need a helicopter and a chainsaw, for starters.
To see more pictures, head over to Thomas Geersing’s amazing gallery!