The World’s Strangest Vaults: Nine Real Vaults and What’s Inside Them

The strangest vaults in the world don’t hold gold. They hold a soft drink recipe, a million and a half seed samples, a Cold War cash reserve, a nation’s family trees and the world’s open source code. Here are nine, with what’s inside, who built them and whether you can get in.

What makes a vault strange?

A bank vault is a strongroom built to keep money and valuables safe, usually behind a heavy round or rectangular door with a time lock (we explain the parts in how bank vaults work). The vaults below use the same ideas, depth, mass, divided knowledge and a door very few people may open, to guard things nobody would think of putting in a bank. That’s our test for “strange”: an odd thing to lock up, an odd place to lock it, or an odd reason for doing it.

We kept to vaults where the owner or a reliable reporter has published the details. Lists of the “world’s most secure” vaults are full of minefields and laser grids nobody can source; if that’s the question you came with, our sourced comparison of the most secure bank vaults in the world answers it. This page is about the odd ones.

Nine strange vaults compared

1. The Coca-Cola vault: a recipe behind a hand scanner

Most vaults guard things worth a lot by weight. This one guards a piece of paper. Dr John S. Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886, and for its first decades the formula wasn’t written down at all; it was shared with a small group. That changed in 1919, when Ernest Woodruff and a group of investors bought the company from Asa Candler’s family. To finance the deal Woodruff took out a loan, had Candler’s son put the formula on paper and pledged that paper as collateral. It sat in a vault at the Guaranty Bank in New York until the loan was repaid in 1925.¹

Woodruff then took it home to Atlanta and put it in the Trust Company Bank, later SunTrust, where it stayed for 86 years.¹² On 8 December 2011, as the capstone of the company’s 125th anniversary, it went on show in a new exhibit at the World of Coca-Cola museum called the Vault of the Secret Formula. Chief executive Muhtar Kent had placed a metal box, which the company says holds the formula, inside a five-foot-high safe a few days earlier.²

What you see today is a big metal-clad vault with a keypad and a hand-imprint scanner, kept at a distance by a railing. It never opens, and when the Associated Press asked whether the keypad and scanner actually work, Coca-Cola wouldn’t say.² We rather like that: a vault whose security might be partly theatre, guarding a secret that is itself the marketing.

• Strange fact: the formula spent six years as loan collateral in a New York bank before it ever reached an Atlanta vault.¹
• Can you visit? Yes. The vault is the centrepiece of the exhibit at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, but the formula itself stays out of sight.¹²

2. Svalbard Global Seed Vault: the world’s crop insurance

The “doomsday vault” opened on 26 February 2008 on Spitsbergen, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago. The seed store is more than 100 metres inside a mountain, under 40 to 60 metres of rock, where the permafrost holds a steady −3 to −4 °C and refrigeration takes the halls down to −18 °C. There are three halls of about 9.5 by 27 metres, each built for some 1.5 million samples; so far only one is in use.³ In November 2026 the vault’s own counter stood at 1,417,799 seed samples.⁴

Norway built and paid for it, but the seeds aren’t Norway’s. Each box belongs to the gene bank that deposited it, it’s stored on “black box” terms (nobody opens it), and only the depositor can ask for it back. The vault is opened for deposits three times a year, plus special openings when needed.⁵

For years it was a vault nobody took anything out of. Then the war in Syria damaged the gene bank of ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, at Aleppo. In September 2015 ICARDA asked for almost 130 of the 325 boxes it had deposited, to replace lost seed of wheat, barley and grasses for dry regions. A Norwegian ministry official told Reuters it would be the first withdrawal since the vault opened.⁶

• Strange fact: the entrance is also an artwork. The light installation on the portal, Perpetual Repercussion, is by the Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne.³
• Can you visit? Not inside: the vault is closed to the public, and a virtual tour was released for its 15th anniversary in 2023. Plenty of visitors take a selfie at the door.⁷³

3. Fort Knox: the gold vault that babysat the Constitution

The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was finished in December 1936 at a cost of $560,000. The Mint lists 16,000 cubic feet of granite, 4,200 cubic yards of concrete, 750 tons of reinforcing steel and 670 tons of structural steel, and the first gold arrived on 13 January 1937.⁸ According to Mosler’s own account, the vault door was shipped from the Mosler works in Hamilton, Ohio in June 1936, weighed 20 tons and was 21 inches thick.⁹ The Mint doesn’t name the maker.

Gold is only half the story. On 26 December 1941, less than three weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution left Washington by train for Fort Knox, guarded by Secret Service agents, and a 1215 Magna Carta in the Library of Congress’s care went with them.¹⁰¹¹ The American documents came back in 1944. We tell that wartime story in full in safes and vaults of the Second World War.

What makes Fort Knox odd today is how little anyone sees of it. “No visitors are permitted,” says the Mint, and “no one person knows all the procedures to open the vault”. Before 1974 the only outsider inside was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Journalists and members of Congress were let in on 23 September 1974, when rumours said the gold had gone, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kentucky’s governor visited on 24 August 2017.⁸

• Strange fact: before 1974, the only outsider who had been inside was the President.⁸
• Can you visit? No. The Mint permits no visitors.⁸

4. London Silver Vaults: a safe deposit turned shopping arcade

Under Chancery Lane there’s a vault you can walk into without an appointment and buy a teapot in. It began as the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, which by its own account opened at 61–62 Chancery Lane in 1882, only the second private safe depository in the country outside the banks. Wealthy Londoners left household silver, jewellery and papers there while they were away at their country houses, and by 1890 it had 6,000 safe boxes for 3,000 customers.¹² Other accounts give earlier or later opening dates; we’ve used the vaults’ own.

The strongrooms were built with walls nearly four feet thick, lined with steel, behind a three-foot steel door that is still in use. During the Blitz a bomb destroyed the Victorian building above, but the strongrooms underneath survived with their contents.¹²

Silver dealers had been trading from the vaults since about 1941, and when a new building went up on top they stayed. In 1953 the vaults were officially recognised as a shopping destination and renamed the London Silver Vaults.¹² So the odd thing here isn’t the door, it’s what’s behind it: each strongroom is a shop. If you’ve inherited a little key from an old box like the ones that used to line these rooms, our guide to identifying safe deposit box keys may help.

• Strange fact: the shops are the strongrooms. You browse through open vault doors.¹²
• Can you visit? Yes: 53–64 Chancery Lane, entrance on Southampton Buildings, Monday to Friday 9:00 to 17:20 and Saturday 9:00 to 12:50, no appointment needed. Check the vaults’ own site before you go.¹²

5. Mount Pony: cash for after the bomb

This is our favourite, because the paperwork survives. In 1968 the Federal Reserve Board approved storing “a large stock of currency” at its Communications and Records Center in Culpeper, Virginia, for emergency use by the Reserve Banks in the eastern United States. A confidential memo of 6 February 1970 told the Board that shipments of new Federal Reserve notes would begin shortly, and listed what was still missing at the vault.¹³

The list is wonderfully mundane. The guards’ telephone line to the Richmond Reserve Bank, used for their periodic checks, could be cut or fail without warning, so the phone company was asked to add an alarm to it. The army had promised federal troops if needed, but the details weren’t worked out. And if the guards wanted the Virginia State Police, they’d have to ring them on an ordinary phone line. The Board’s security consultant still thought shipments could go ahead once the alarm was fitted.¹³

The Federation of American Scientists, drawing on a Brookings study and press reports, describes the bunker inside Mount Pony as a 140,000 sq ft radiation-hardened facility dedicated on 10 December 1969. It was also the hub of the Fed’s electronic funds transfers, and FAS says it held a $1 billion stock of currency to restart the economy after a nuclear attack until 1988.¹⁴ The Fed’s own memo gives no figure, so treat the amount as the secondary sources’ estimate.

In 1997 Congress approved handing the bunker over to the Library of Congress.¹⁴ The Packard Foundation provided the grant to buy the site in 1998, and the Library’s Collections Building now occupies “the same basic structure that was built for the Federal Reserve in the 1960s”. A separate building holds 124 purpose-built vaults for nitrate film, the old and highly flammable cinema stock.¹⁵

• Strange fact: a vault built for banknotes after Armageddon now keeps America’s films and sound recordings.¹⁵
• Can you visit? It’s a working archive, now the Library of Congress Packard Campus. We found no regular public tours.

6. Granite Mountain Records Vault: family trees in the rock

Up Little Cottonwood Canyon, outside Salt Lake City, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps its master copies of the world’s genealogy. Blasting began in May 1960, the first microfilm arrived in April 1963 and the vault was dedicated on 22 June 1966. About 675 feet of granite lies above the tunnels, the entrance doors weigh 9 to 14 tons each, and since 2001 the vault has been held at a steady 55 °F and 35% humidity.¹⁶

Inside are more than 3.5 billion images on microfilm, microfiche and digital media, filmed under agreements with archives, libraries and churches in over 100 countries. The custodian of each record gets a copy free of charge, and the Church says extra copies have sometimes replaced records lost to disasters: after a cyclone it replaced genealogical records for the Pacific island nation of Niue. The films are being digitised and published on FamilySearch.¹⁷ If you’ve ever traced a great-grandmother online, there’s a fair chance a copy of that register sits in this mountain.

• Strange fact: it was once open to visitors. Public tours began when construction finished in December 1963.¹⁶
• Can you visit? Not any more: the Church keeps it closed for security and offers a video tour instead.¹⁷

7. Arctic World Archive: data on film in a coal mine

Svalbard’s second doomsday vault opened on 27 March 2017 in Mine 3 (Gruve 3), a coal mine outside Longyearbyen that had been out of use for about 20 years. It’s run by Piql, a company from Drammen founded in 2002 by Rune Bjerkestrand; the mining company Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani still owns the mine and handles security and day-to-day running. The first deposits came from the national archives of Brazil and Mexico, which stored their constitutions, and from Sogn og Fjordane county council in Norway.¹⁸

Nothing here is digital in the usual sense. Data is written onto photosensitive film, which Piql said would last at least 500 years and which it hoped to prove good for 1,000. The mine itself stays at about −5 to −10 °C all year.¹⁸ Depositors listed by the archive include the Vatican Library, the National Museum of Norway (for Munch’s The Scream), Yale, UNICEF and the European Space Agency.¹⁹

The best known deposit is code. GitHub took a snapshot of active public repositories on 2 February 2020 and deposited it in the mine on 8 July 2020: 21 terabytes on 186 reels of film. Every reel carries a guide in five languages, and a separate human-readable reel, the “Tech Tree”, explains the technology needed to make sense of the rest.²⁰ Of everything on this page, that might be the strangest detail: a vault that comes with its own instruction manual.

• Strange fact: the pandemic kept GitHub’s team from escorting their code north, so the boxes were flown to Svalbard as soon as it reopened to visitors from the Schengen area.²⁰
• Can you visit? We found no public access to the vault itself.

8. The New York Fed gold vault: three people to change a light bulb

The biggest known store of monetary gold sits on Manhattan’s bedrock, 80 feet below street level and 50 feet below sea level. Its only entrance is a 90-ton steel cylinder, nine feet tall, turning in a 140-ton frame of steel and concrete. Four steel rods lock it, and time clocks keep it shut until the next business day.²¹ When the building went up in the 1920s, York Safe and Lock advertised that it had built six revolving vault entrances for the bank, each ten feet thick, as you can see in York’s 1924 Federal Reserve advert.

The strange part is the bookkeeping. In 2024 the vault held about 507,000 bars weighing 6,331 metric tons, and none of it belongs to the Fed. It holds the gold for the US government, foreign governments, other central banks and official international organisations, in 122 compartments, each closed with a padlock, two combination locks and an auditor’s seal. Storage is free; the owners pay only a handling fee when gold moves. Depositors get back the exact bars they put in, and a three-person team (two from the vault, one from internal audit) must be there whenever a compartment is opened, even to change a light bulb.²¹

• Strange fact: before 1986 you could tell where a US bar was cast by its shape: Denver bars have rounded sides, San Francisco bars rounded corners and New York bars square edges.²¹
• Can you visit? Yes. The New York Fed runs free tours you book online, and a visit to the gold vault depends on availability.²¹

9. Underground Vaults & Storage: Hollywood in a Kansas salt mine

About 650 feet under the grassland near Hutchinson, Kansas, a storage company has rented out space in a salt mine since 1959. Underground Vaults & Storage began mainly with oil and gas records; today it keeps government records, private assets, film reels and movie props in 50 of the mine’s roughly 900 acres. Salt rooms sit at about 20 °C and 45% humidity, and the company has built refrigerated panels for film clients who need it colder and drier.²²

Its president, Jeff Ollenburger, gave Eos the house rule: “We will store anything that’s not illegal, flammable, or explosive.” The only real size limit is the lift, about 8 by 4 feet.²² It’s a vault in the old sense of a cellar as much as a strongroom, and that’s what we like about it: the mountain of salt does most of the work.

• Strange fact: Strataca, the salt museum in the same mine, shows film items including a shirt James Dean wore in Giant and costumes from The Matrix.²²
• Can you visit? The storage galleries are a private business, but Strataca runs booked tours from Tuesday to Sunday.²³

What about the government cheese caves?

You’ll find the “government cheese vault” under Springfield, Missouri on most lists like this one. We tried to source it and couldn’t. The well-known figure of about 1.4 billion pounds is the total in US cold storage, and when Modern Farmer checked the latest report in 2022 it found a little under 1.5 billion pounds, of which only about 300 million belonged to the USDA; the rest was privately owned. The USDA’s price support programme, which bought surplus cheese, butter and milk powder from 1949, ended in 2014.²⁴ Where exactly the government’s share is kept, we couldn’t confirm from an official source, so it stays off the list until we can.

Fictional vaults: Gringotts, Fallout and the Bank of Spain

The strangest vaults of all are the invented ones. Gringotts, the goblin-run bank of the Harry Potter books, and the numbered shelters of the Fallout games borrow their round doors and deep tunnels straight from the real vaults above. The best crossover between fiction and fact is in Madrid, where the TV series Money Heist made a real gold vault famous; we separate what’s true from what’s television in our history of the Bank of Spain vault and its flood trap.

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