New wonders and curiosities added to the Atlas.
Live Last read · last published · next check
Located just off the main entrance road of New Mexico’s Valles Caldera–a 14-mile-wide circular depression created by a massive volcanic eruption 1.2 million years ago–it is hard to believe that this cabin could have gone missing. Instead, this cabin was built as part of the set of “The Missing,” a 2003 Western starring Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett. Since the National Park Service began…
In 2012, the owner of a local Ottawa, Illinois, repair shop towed a 2001 Volvo S80 onto a peninsula and then used an excavator to create a small, one-car island. He intended to run a contest asking people to guess how the Volvo got there. The contest never materialized, as there was some concern that people might try to cross the 40-foot-deep lake for a better look. However, the Volvo remained.…
What do you do when you've built a shopping mall but you find an ancient Roman temple underneath part of it? If you are in Mainz, Germany, you build the mall up around it, but leave it in place to be a hidden museum to the past. This is the "Isis-Heiligtum" (Isis Temple) in Mainz, Germany, preserved in place beneath the Römerpassage shopping mall within an easy 10-minute walk from Mainz…
Most airport terminals are designed simply to move travelers from one place to another. Terminal 1 at Hurghada International Airport attempts something more ambitious: turning the landscape outside into part of the building. Opened in late 2014, the terminal covers approximately 92,600 square meters across three main levels. Its most distinctive feature is the enormous elevated ceiling, whose…
Opened in 2023, this tunnel is 2.9 km long (about 1.8 miles). Very useful for pedestrians, bicyclists, various exercising in a city where it rains almost all year. Now also easily binding together two parts of the city that previously was parted by a mountain and took a long time to travel around. Nice resting area in the middle as the tunnel there has a hall. Very colourful light throughout the…
Near Axtell, Texas, 20 miles north-east of Waco was a large group of buildings known as the Mount Carmel Center once used by the Branch Davidian religious group. Named after the Biblical mountain Mount Carmel in Israel, the Davidians (later Branch Davidians) lived in relatively peaceful isolation from the Waco community. As a city with deep religious roots itself, Waco generally accepted the…
Few phenomena can reliably unite the notoriously fragmented population of Spain, but the obsession with El Gordo —the nation’s historic Christmas lottery—is unquestionably one of them. At the heart of this annual ritual of collective hope stands a single legendary shop in the capital, whose origins trace back to a remarkably ambitious young woman. In 1904, a 25-year-old woman named Manuela de…
In 1832, counties in central Illinois were calling for volunteers to protect the frontier from Black Hawk and his Sauk warriors. On the morning of May 14, 1832, tensions came to a head. Black Hawk’s warriors discovered Major Isaiah Stillman and nearly 300 militia men had set up camp uncomfortably close by, near Sycamore Creek in what is now Ogle County. Black Hawk, not yet ready for combat, sent…
East Finchley is in an area now in North London which was once adjacent to both the hunting ground of the Bishop of London and Finchley Common, over which locals held commoners rights including hunting. The Archer, then, is an enduring symbol of the settlement which the statue might relate to although it has been suggested that it was a purely decorative object and all other Archer links followed…
Perched on a sun-drenched slope in Eltville am Rhein, Kloster Eberbach stands as a masterpiece of Cistercian architecture, founded in 1136 by twelve monks seeking isolation and spiritual rigor. The abbey is famous for its vast, column-free Romanesque grain barn and its historic wine cellars, which have been producing Rheingau Rieslings for nearly nine centuries, making it a pivotal site in the…
