(CNN) — Some call it the ghost town, because for decades it didn’t appear on any maps — a clandestine location that at the height of the Cold War likely concealed a deadly arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of wiping out major Western cities.
Others refer to it as the Polish Chernobyl, because the cloak of secrecy thrown up around its radioactive mysteries drew anxious comparisons to the exclusion zone surrounding the disaster-hit Ukrainian power station.
But today, Borne Sulinowo, in northern Poland’s West Pomeranian region, is emerging as an exciting travel destination for adventure seekers looking to explore a beautiful natural area, and a relatively unknown Soviet hotspot with a very dark past.
Reaching this town from Szczecin, the region’s capital, involves a long drive through Poland’s mostly rural lowlands, a terrain that also still carries the legacy of the Cold War.
Nowhere more so than the town of Drawsko Pomorskie, the location of the largest military training ground for…