The ruined villas scattered across the hillsides above Kep are the most striking reminder of what the Khmer Rouge left behind. These were grand modernist houses built in the 1960s for Cambodia's urban elite — open-plan, with wide terraces and views over the Gulf. When the Khmer Rouge evacuated the cities in 1975, the owners were marched away. The buildings were ransacked and then left to decay. Today they sit among the trees: roofless, overgrown, their terrazzo floors cracking, their swimming pools dry. You can walk past many of them along the roads above town. Nobody stops you, and nobody pretends this is a formal attraction. It isn't — it's just what happened here.
Khmer Rouge Villa Ruins
Overgrown 1960s villas abandoned during the Khmer Rouge era
A story
A bullet-riddled Mercedes sitting in the driveway of one of the ruined villas is said by locals to have been the last car used by Pol Pot before he fled into the jungle in 1979. Whether or not the story is true, the car has been rotting there for decades and nobody has moved it.