The Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 is remembered as one of the most devastating natural disasters in Japanese history, counting well over 100,000 casualties in and around Tokyo. The port city of Yokohama was also badly hit by the earthquake. Of the casualties in Yokohama, 28 were … | Continue reading
Water is needed for human survival, and for transportation, so it's no surprise that many old cities are built near rivers. But rivers bring with them the danger of flooding. Heidelberg's Old Bridge commemorates some of the worst instances of the Neckar flooding over the course o … | Continue reading
Sitting in the heart of Hargeisa, the Oriental Hotel is the oldest surviving and operating building in the capital of Somaliland. In the late 1980s, Somaliland began a concerted attempt to break away from Somalia and the brutal dictatorial rule of Somali president Siad Barre. In … | Continue reading
Bruneau Dunes lie in the Eagle Cove Depression, an ancient cut-off meander of the Snake River. The initial sand deposits were left by the Bonneville Flood around 15,000 years ago, when Pleistocene Lake Bonneville in Utah overtopped a low pass and sent a huge flood down the Snake … | Continue reading
Created by master carver Matahi Whakataka-Brightwell, this Māori rock carving rises from the surface of Lake Taupō's Mine Bay. It is surrounded by smaller sculptures along the water's edge. Depicting the legendary Māori navigator Ngātoro-i-rangi, this impressive work of art can o … | Continue reading
On September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake struck the eastern part of Japan, devastating Tokyo and taking the lives of nearly 150,000. Unexpectedly, one of its aftershocks, called the Tanzawa earthquake, led to a stunning archaeological discovery in January of the following year. … | Continue reading
Standing in the arid Mediterranean landscape, take a whiff from the tip of a clay gooseneck bottle. Notes of geranium and thyme hit your nose first, with hints of pine underneath, and then a lingering, complex herbaceousness. To a trained nose, the smell may at first seem distinc … | Continue reading
Glance down at the pavement on Main Street in Burlington, Vermont and your eyes may fall on a pair of brass plaques embedded in the pavement. These handmade metal markers are part of a larger public art installation throughout the United States to commemorate the lives of some of … | Continue reading
Back at the 2024 Oscars, the true winner wasn’t an actor or actress or director. It wasn’t even (just) Ken. It was an archetype. The two films that took home the most Academy Awards were the atomic-bomb drama Oppenheimer and the comedy Poor Things, and both pictures rode to that … | Continue reading
In the North Welsh town of Llandudno, a series of quirky statues create a sculpture trail commemorating Alice in Wonderland. Back in the Victorian era, Llandudno was a popular seaside resort. Among its best-known vacationers were Henry George Liddell and his family, most notably … | Continue reading
The rising late summer sun cuts through the morning fog on the green expanse of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. The rays slice across a towering circle of expertly carved stone slabs, casting long shadows. A handful of men gather at the center of the prehistoric megalithic … | Continue reading
Shab Bhar Masjid is also known as the Night Mosque, though "Overnight Mosque" might be more accurate. In 1917, the British authorities were called upon to decide whether the Hindu or Muslim communities would be allowed to build their house of worship on this tiny piece of propert … | Continue reading
Food and fantasy have long gone hand in hand. Our oldest myths and fairy tales abound with ravenous monsters and enchanted apples, while modern fantasy literature has brought us the second breakfast-savoring hobbits of The Lord of the Rings and the sprawling medieval banquets of … | Continue reading
The Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) in Northampton, Massachusetts includes two very unique works of art in their permanent collection. They are unique not just because they can be found inside the museum bathrooms. They are the bathrooms. All the fixtures in these all-gender r … | Continue reading
Greg Brick knew it was there, lurking beneath his city, hidden within the Minneapolis water and sewer system: an enticing geologic anomaly called Schieks Cave. For years, he'd read about this maze, carved through the sandstone by rushing water. But his first attempt to find it le … | Continue reading
This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. Domestic cats will do almost anything to avoid contact with water. Not so for their wild cousins, though. Lions, tigers, and jaguars have had to adapt to water and sometimes … | Continue reading
In Harrislee, a suburb of Flensburg in northern Germany, Das Wahlversprechen ('The Election Promise') captures attention. Created by Bernd Maro and unveiled in 1994, this whimsical bronze ensemble features eight figures, most of them laughing. Their exaggerated gestures and farci … | Continue reading
Each week, Atlas Obscura is providing a new short excerpt from our upcoming book, Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders (September 17, 2024). Jawless and vertebrae-less, the Pacific lamprey is a single muscle, up to 30 inches (76 cm) long. Its most infamous … | Continue reading
Over 10,000 orphaned and abandoned children made their way through the halls of the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children between 1886 and 1945. At the time, housing orphaned children in a dedicated facility was a revolutionary idea. Before then, they … | Continue reading
With online shopping providing the rarest, most far-flung ingredients at the click of a button these days, it’s easy to forget how challenging cooking in a diaspora once was. Khushbu Shah hasn’t forgotten. She remembers watching her mother in their Michigan kitchen, working wonde … | Continue reading
Toldbod Bodega is the traditional Danish restaurant that Copenhagen locals constantly direct their visiting friends to—even Noma chef-founder René Redzepi. “[T]he setting is like stepping back 70 years,” he told The Times for a 2014 city guide. “It’s a little time capsule of a re … | Continue reading
Hidden in Hampshire's New Forest is an off-the-grid illuminated target, one of the many artifacts of Britain's efforts in the Second World War. Ashley Walk became an established practice bombing range in November of 1939, with its lease agreed in February 1940 and becoming operat … | Continue reading
Alexandra Palace is a large Victorian-era entertainment venue located in the North London borough of Haringey between Muswell Hill and Wood Green. The building was designed incorporating many architectural elements from the International Exhibition building in 1862 and opened in … | Continue reading
Off the coast of Fujisawa, just outside Kamakura, Enoshima is a scenic island popular among couples due to its romantic reputations. For instance, there is a “lovers’ hill,” a secluded escape covered with love locks and topped with a lucky bell called Ryuren no Kane, or “Dragon L … | Continue reading
Built in 1894 to replace the previous jail, this site served as the county jail until 1972. Equipped with 16 cells, including a maximum-security wing on the second floor, it housed a variety of inmates including juveniles and adults, men and women. The jail was the site of seven … | Continue reading
North of Bourbon, located in Louisville’s Germantown, is a celebration of Gullah Geechee, Viet-Cajun, and other cuisines rooted in the diasporic communities of the American South. When compiling the menu, Executive Chef Lawrence Weeks drew on his own family heritage, as well as a … | Continue reading
When fans really love a character, they try to embody them from all angles: dressing up like them (cosplay) or traveling to the place they canonically live (fan tourism) or creating works of art about them (fanart, fanfiction, vids, playlists—only some of a huge range of things u … | Continue reading
One of the most popular tourist spots in Kamakura, Hase-dera Temple is famed for the 30-foot-tall wooden statue of Kannon and the hydrangea blooms in its gardens in May and June. The temple complex is quite large, however, and some of its attractions often go unexplored by visito … | Continue reading
Military museums typically focus on a particular service, or conflict, or even just a weapons system. This museum has a different slant: it looks at the contributions to the various services made by Pennsylvania. The scale of the contributions should not be surprising, as Pennsyl … | Continue reading
Along the eastern side of Iowa State Highway 12, on the southern outskirts of the town of Akron, Ohio travelers will perhaps be startled to encounter the pseudo-reptilian, metallic visage of Warty Willy, the local stegosaurus. Warty Willy is one of the earliest known life-sized, … | Continue reading
Over the course of the last decade, Talad Noi has morphed from a relatively sleepy neighborhood near Bangkok's Chao Phraya River into a buzzy arts district. Today, the area is a blend of new and old, with third-wave coffee shops and art galleries sharing street space with histori … | Continue reading
In 1066, during the Battle of Stamford Bridge a few miles outside York, Vikings and Saxons fought furiously. Legend says that a lone Viking warrior held the bridge—for a time—against the entire Saxon army. Standing in the middle of the bridge and swinging his great sword, he cut … | Continue reading
This location of an original art studio and accompanying gallery building named for and linked to Finnish painter Albert Edelfelt is thanks to his mother, Alexandra. In 1879, Alexandra rented out a coastal summer house in the Finnish village of Haikko, near the city of Porvoo, wh … | Continue reading
Known for its early handmade glass tableware, the Imperial Glass Company, a.k.a. "The Big I," manufactured glassware for 80 years in the town of Bellaire, Ohio. The Imperial Glass Collectors' Society established this museum in 2003 to keep its legacy alive in the area. The Imperi … | Continue reading
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a province of Pakistan located in the northwest, along the border with Afghanistan. Today, a network of roads crisscrosses the province, bypassing formidable mountain peaks and following spectacular valleys. In ancient times, some locations in this province … | Continue reading
In 2022, a new statue was unveiled on Jewry Street, Winchester, portraying a regal woman in queenly garb and her son. This enigmatic figure is no royal but a rather obscure figure of the Middle Ages, albeit one with powerful significance in local history. Licoricia of Winchester … | Continue reading
The Las Vegas Valley is the improbable site of world-class fossils of late Pleistocene megafauna (large animals), including such iconic species as the saber-toothed cat, the giant ground sloth, the mammoth, and the American horse, camel, and lion. The fossils occur in sediments p … | Continue reading
Gathered around Piccadilly Street in the summer of 1815, Londoners were celebrating the recent British victory over Napoleon. The area was packed with people, forcing traffic to a crawl. As memoirist Rees Howell Gronow wrote in 1864, one carriage in particular drew the crowd’s at … | Continue reading
Henry Harrison Mayes (1898-1986) was a coal miner in Mingo Hollow, west of Middlesboro, Kentucky, just north of the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. He was also, as he referred to himself, "God’s Advertiser." It took Burma Shave five signs to try to sell shaving cream but with a si … | Continue reading
On a fall day in 2018, Nicola Rammell got into the rhythm of reading dead fish for clues as to what killed them. Wearing waders and white latex gloves, she walked along the skinny streams feeding into a river on British Columbia’s Central Coast with a gaff hook in hand, scanning … | Continue reading
Opened in October 2012, the Elena Garro Cultural Center takes up a Coyoacán mansion (locally known as casona) that dates to the early 20th century. In order to expand their many bookshelves beyond the space offered by this building, the architectural redesign would see a concrete … | Continue reading
The Muddy Mountains of southern Nevada, between Lake Mead and Interstate 15, consist largely of dark limestone thrust over younger rocks, the colorful Aztec (Navajo) Sandstone of Jurassic age, on a low-angle fault. In Valley of Fire State Park, the overlying limestones have been … | Continue reading
Founded in 1619, the public library of Rimini called Biblioteca Civica Gambalunga is an impressive Renaissance establishment with a collection of almost 300,000 books. Often described as Italy's first civic library, its building was commissioned by local lawyer Alessandro Gambalu … | Continue reading
The small Baltic island of Hanö, pop: 35, in southern Sweden is often described as picturesque. However, before the mid-1800s, it was a different story. Back then, frightened mainlanders nearby claimed to hear nightly screams across the waters from the island. Local legends spoke … | Continue reading
Flanked by an elementary school and a local shopping mall on the other side of the road, this looks like an ordinary site except for a prominent watchtower that seems to belong to another era. Indeed this tower, more than a century old, served as the entry point to the gunpowder … | Continue reading
The year was 1789 when an old man shoveled dirt onto two hefty barrels of silver, hidden away in a cave on the roaring banks of the Swift River in Massachusetts. He needed to bury his treasure, because he had procured it by means that were considered illegal and, at one point, my … | Continue reading
Shelves lined with cracked geodes, boxes and bins full of glittering crystals and minerals, and displays of fossils fill this colorful store. Miners Rock Shop is full of Arizona's geological wonders. Miner and jeweler Sonseeahray "Sonny" Baar and archeologist Sam Baar, owners of … | Continue reading
West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village, nestled in the scenic Suffolk countryside, is home to original homes unearthed during archaeological excavations. As visitors wander through the village, you can explore these dwellings, each painstakingly crafted using traditional techniques and ma … | Continue reading