Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did

This same thing has happened in the USA as well. TVA will use eminent domain to seize a bunch of properties, paying fair market value (usually a little bit above appraisal, hardly enough to compensate for having one's farm destroyed and needing to start over), and then sometimes the project falls through or gets cancelled. 20, 30, 50 years later, the property is sitting there, now federal land, no one on it, with no planned use for the future. It would make sense to sell it to someone to use, but they never do. They just squat on vast acreages acquired for obsolete projects.

New London Connecticut went to the Supreme Court to establish the right of local governments to seize private property on behalf of for-profit multinational corporations, under the theory that the corporation would pay more in tax and thus evicting the owner and seizing their home is a public good. Connecticut won and established this right permanently as fundamental to the Constitution, unable to be challenged or diminished by law. New London's corporate master then decided they didn't really want the land after all. Owner was cast out and her life destroyed, her house sitting rotting to this day, no taxes at all being collected. But thank God the corporations have this new Constitutional right to seize any private property under eminent domain!