Goussainville-Vieux-Pays: the village under the flight path

Twenty kilometres north of Paris, directly beneath the flight path of Charles de Gaulle airport, there is an old village that most Parisians have never heard of. It is called Goussainville-Vieux-Pays — 'the old country' — and it is one of the strangest places in France: a historic village, largely intact, largely empty, with an international airport roaring overhead.

The disaster of 1973

The turning point came on 3 June 1973, during the Paris Air Show. A Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 — a supersonic airliner, the Soviet answer to Concorde — broke apart in the air and crashed into the village. Six crew members and eight people on the ground were killed, and several houses were destroyed.

The disaster was shocking enough on its own. But it arrived less than a year before Charles de Gaulle airport opened nearby in 1974, and the combination of grief and the coming noise was more than many residents could bear. Families began to leave. Within a year, the emptying was well under way.

A village that stayed behind

Not everyone left. A handful of the most stubborn residents stayed, and they are still there — living in a village that has become, around them, a kind of museum of absence. Houses stand with their doors ajar. Gardens have gone wild. In some rooms, furniture and belongings were left as they were, as if the owners meant to come back.

Over the decades, squatters moved into the emptier buildings, and graffiti accumulated. The village's château, gutted, can be seen right through, from basement to upper floor, in a single view.

What Goussainville means

Goussainville is the clearest example in France of a village emptied not by war or industry, but by infrastructure. The airport did not destroy the houses. It destroyed the reason to live in them. That is a very modern kind of abandonment, and it is becoming more common.

For more than forty years, no serious attempt was made to reclaim the old village. Its future remains uncertain — caught between its history, its location and the noise that never stops.

Frequently asked questions

Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Barmaz: the Alpine hamlet that emptied in a single winter — Italy
• The château the fire left behind — and the 27,000 people who saved it — France
• The Salins de Frontignan: a salt works on the French coast — France