However, a catastrophic fire on the night of November 30, 1936, gutted the main hall. While the iconic towers managed to survive the flames, they were doomed by the onset of World War II. In 1941, they were deliberately pulled down because the government realized they were serving as perfect navigation landmarks for incoming German bombers.
The decision sparked a massive outcry, particularly from the Gascón de Gotor brothers, who slammed the move as “patricide” and the “greatest artistic crime committed in Spain.” Their protests were in vain and workers spent a year dismantling the icon, selling off the bricks to build foundations for new local houses. Today, the only trace left is a memorial sculpture of a boy sitting on the pavement, gazing up at the empty sky where the tower used to be.
Although the church sold the booming resort in 1906, it remained a major attraction until disaster struck on April 22, 1925. On that day, a massive fire tore through the complex, reducing the first pavilion and several other buildings to ash and ending the first chapter of this legendary Utah landmark.
When the fair ended, the tower was demolished, but the organizers saved the glittering “Novagems” that adorned the exterior. They tagged each gem with a brass medallion to prove it had hung on the tower, boxed them up, and sold them off as souvenirs for a single dollar apiece.
However, survival wasn’t in the cards once the region transformed into the Soviet Union’s Kaliningrad Oblast in 1946. The authorities spent years systematically demolishing what was left, wiping out the final section by 1968. In a twist of irony, the massive “House of Soviets” they built to replace it was never actually finished, and it simply sat as an abandoned concrete shell for decades until it was finally torn down just a couple of years ago in 2024.
General Erich Ludendorff gave the order to level the keep and the four towers, an act that historians still debate as either military strategy or pure spite. The destruction caused such a massive public outcry that the site was officially declared a “memorial to barbarity” the very next month. While war reparations were eventually used to shore up the surrounding walls, the keep itself was left as a pile of rubble.
The original structure, a 15th-century Ming Dynasty masterpiece located on the banks of the Qinhuai River, had been tragic collateral damage during the Taiping Rebellion, getting mostly destroyed back in 1856. Thanks to that massive influx of cash, a modern replica and surrounding park finally opened their doors to the public in December 2015.
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