Off-limits to tourists: From Bolivia's 'death road' to the ancient villages of Yemen, a peek inside beautiful places travellers DON'T visit

By Annabel Elliot For Mailonline

Published: 03:29 EST, 7 November 2016 | Updated: 03:41 EST, 8 November 2016

These azure lakes are found in Afghanistan's first and only National Park, Band-e Amir - and while tourists who've been describe it as being extraordinarily special, the UK government still advises against all travel across a lot of this Middle Eastern country

© Getty Images
  • Most of these destinations fall under the UK Foreign Office's 'red zone'
  • Deemed too dangerous for tourists, they have beautiful sights to behold from afar
  • Locations include the Republic of Congo, Lebanon and Yemen
© Getty Images

An abandoned village in Dagestan, situated in Russia's breathtaking North Caucasus mountains, where the last residents died off in 2015. Sadly a region also on the FOC's do-not-travel list

While much of the world is the modern traveller's oyster, there are regions you can't roam freely.

Whether that be the mysterious lands of North Korea, where tourists are restricted solely to guided tours under close supervision, or Syria, currently in the throes of war.

But in many of these places, extraordinary beauty lurks behind the tightly-drawn curtains, along with the promise that some day they'll be free to explore again.

Afghanistan, for example, boasts Band-e Amir, a breathtaking national park brimming with lakes of electric blue, but much of its surroundings are currently deemed by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office as being unsafe for tourism. 

With a few exceptions, all the magnificent destinations showcased here fall under the FOC's red zone - areas where 'all travel' is expressly advised against.

Said notable exceptions include Norway's Domesday Vault, a heavily guarded cavern built under the Arctic snow which contains seeds from almost every nation on earth to be retrieved in the case of an global catastrophe. 

Good luck getting a peek in there.

© Getty Images

The ancient Unesco listed city of Palmyra, in Syria, once drew thousands of tourists a year, but was largely decimated when ISIS took hold of it in 2015 and blew up several of its central 2,000-year-old structures

© Getty Images

The scenery may be marvellous, but the Karakoram highway that links China with Pakistan is also one of the most dangerous roads in the word, with particularly perilous landslide-prone terrain, and areas on the FOC's list

© Getty Images/age fotostock RM

Mali, a country of rolling savanna grasslands in northwestern Africa, is currently in a state of emergency with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FOC) warning of a 'high threat from terrorism, including kidnap'

© Getty Images

Several areas of Lebanon's sprawling capital city, Beirut, are on high alert due to terrorist activity, with the FOC advising against travel there and elsewhere in the country

© Getty Images/National Geographic Magazines

The heavily-guarded Svalbard Global Seed Vault off the coast of Norway, also known as the 'Doomsday Vault', stores seeds that could be retrieved in the event of a huge environmental disaster and is unsurprisingly off-limits to all but a select few

© FlickrVision

North Korea is one of the most secretive nations in the world, admitting foreigners only under constant supervision, but boasts beautiful forests and volcanic regions like this, Mount Paektu

© Getty Images

Ethiopia's Danakil Depression, with its volatile sulfur fields, is one of the hottest and most inhospitable places on earth geologically, with surrounding political unrest that also lands it a spot on the FOC's list

© Getty Images/Yann Arthus-Bertrand

The ongoing Congolese Civil Wars continue to make the Democratic Republic of Congo highly dangerous, and the FOC has outlined the astonishingly beautiful region of Likouala, pictured, as being particularly off-limits

© Getty Images

Bolivia's North Yungus Road - better known as 'The Death Road' - attracts daredevil cyclists from around the world, despite claiming around 300 lives a year thanks to its narrow, 15,400-foot-high unfenced bends

© robertharding/REX/Shutterstock

The whole of Yemen, which borders with Saudi Arabia and boasts some stunning archaeological sites, has been declared by the FOC as 'very tense and unstable' with its current warning reading: 'If you’re in Yemen, you should leave immediately'

© Getty Images/National Geographic Creative

The winding caves of Lascaux in southwestern France are famed for their 17,000-year-old Paleolithic cave paintings - once available to walk around, but closed to the public since the 1960s in a bid to protect their fragility