The term ruins is used to describe the remains of human architecture, structures that were once whole, but have partially or completely collapsed due to lack of maintenance or deliberate acts of destruction. Natural disasters, wars and depopulation are the most common causes that lead a building to ruins.

Famous ones existed all over the world, from ancient sites in China, the Indus Valley and Judea, to Zimbabwean sites in Africa, Greece, Egypt and Rome on the Mediterranean side of the basin, as well as in the Inca and Mayan territories of the Americas.

Ruins are very important to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, be they what were once fortifications, places of worship, houses, buildings or towns, villas "Villa (population)") and entire cities. Many of the ruins discovered or known have become World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in recent years, an entity that identifies and preserves them as areas of exceptional value for humanity.

The ruins have been part of the repertoire of ideas and currents of thought and philosophical and aesthetic reflection since the pagan poet of Rome Rutilio Namaciano testified to the decline of the Roman Empire in his time before the ruins of Populonia (De reditu suo, I 401-14); It is one of the first treatments of the literary topic of "ruins", which would gain so much development from the 18th century onwards in Spain (To the ruins of Itálica by Rodrigo Caro, for example)[1]​ and in the 18th century engravings of the Italian Piranesi, and later with Edmund Burke and William Gilpin, related to aesthetic categories such as the sublime and the picturesque, typical of romanticism.

In the century, nature itself is imagined as ruin, while in the century, ruin is no longer the result of the passage of time but of wars and the decline of industry. Up to this point the issue of ruins in humanity is mainly a problem dealt with by aesthetic theory. However, at the end of the last century, and with much more force today, the ruins of the recent past have become the main focus of many investigations in different fields. Both the ruins of antiquity and the new ruins of contemporary times have represented and continue to represent a focus of attraction throughout history. The passion for ruins is closely linked to the commodification and spectacularization of heritage. However, in recent decades there has been a gradual awareness of the consideration of the industrial world as an essential container of the memory of the past, giving rise to an important movement to preserve industrial heritage.[2]​.