Jennifer Byrne    It’s May , and a nervous energy permeates the air on the set of Thunderball, the fourth James Bond film starring Sean Connery. Soon enough, this jittery anticipation won’t be the only thing in the air. Standing on the roofline of a French chateau, stuntman Bill Suitor is about to use a state...

Jennifer Billock    Scott Nicholson is trapped. He’s stuck in a submarine and it’s sinking. Water is pouring into the room, and he needs to plug the hole before he and his crew drown. Time is ticking, and the water is relentless. Luckily, Nicholson teaches game design. In just a few short moments, he’s able to solve a...

Andrew Coletti    In , Birmingham hosted the quadrennial Commonwealth Games, introducing a massive mechanical bull during the opening ceremony. Standing feet tall and weighing . tonnes, the gargantuan creature amazed many viewers before seemingly fading into oblivion. That is, until he made a triumphant...

April White    Kichij ji, a neighborhood popular for shopping, leisure, and its close proximity to Inokashira Park, frequently tops lists ranking the most desirable places to live in Tokyo. Ride past the area on the Ch line and you can catch a glimpse of one of its oddest attractions: a giant two tier...

The Podcast Team    The first oil well in Bahrain, known as the Bahrain Oil Well No., holds a significant place in the history of the region’s oil industry. In fact, the drilling of this well marked the beginning of the modern oil industry in the country and the Arabian Gulf region. The discovery of oil in Bahrain...

Hannah Seo    Located in a picturesque setting, this small museum is dedicated to what it calls the America’s golden age of canals. From to the mid th century, Pennsylvania constructed hundreds of canals, most noticeably the Erie Canal, covering, miles and employing hundreds of workers. ...

Roxanne Hoorn    Palm Beach, Florida’s Worth Avenue is one of the ritziest and most famous high end shopping districts in America. Each year, thousands of tourists cross the Intracoastal Waterway to visit the island’s luxury houses, pristine beaches, and retail stores. At the end of Worth Avenue, framed against the...

The Podcast Team    On May , , America’s first transcontinental freight train set out from California. On that momentous day, its cargo was a load of Japanese green tea. Today, only percent of the tea drunk annually in the United States is green, and the vast majority of that is produced in countries like...

Kenji Hall    Near the main entrance of the Canadian embassy is a large sculpture of a canoe peopled with mythological figures of the Haida people. It’s native to the islands off the northern coast of British Columbia. The canoe is steered by the Raven, a trickster central to the creation story of many...

Sarah Lohman    Near the East End of Grand Cayman, lies a rather unique natural attraction. The limestone foundation around the island is eroded by the surf of the ocean creating holes and caves along the shore. These holes allow for the tide to come up underneath the surface and force ocean water up and through...

The Podcast Team    In , the United Kingdom’s government was anticipating the outbreak of hostilities with Germany and decided to begin preparing the general population for war. One of those preparatory steps was creating an air raid warning system across the United Kingdom that included a series of electrical...

John Cooley and Chris Simon    Wonder is everywhere. That’s why, every other week, Atlas Obscura drags you down some of the rabbit holes we encounter as we search for our unusual stories. We highlight surprising finds, great writing, and inspiring stories from some of our favorite publications. The Internet Archive Just...

   On the island of Tarout, atop a small hill overlooking the historical neighborhood of Al Dirah, sits the Tarout Castle, a military fort of three towers. The fort is a testament to a period of Portuguese control in the Persian Gulf in the th century, but the hill houses a much older tale spanning...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we speak with author and science writer Mary Roach, who takes us deep into an ancient forest grove on Vancouver Island, in search of the danger trees and the...

   The Riekermolen is located south of the beautiful and green Amstelpark, near De Borcht. It stands on the west side of the Amstel River. It’s one of the easy to access windmills in Amsterdam. What’s great about this windmill is the surroundings, greenery, and the beautiful river, it’s a perfect...

   It isn’t just the spectacular views that make this road in Tangier special a signpost marks where the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea meet. The sign is written in French and Arabic, the two official languages of Morocco.

   When the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum closed in , its cemetery was unceremoniously forgotten. The plant life became tangled overgrowth, wooden grave markers deteriorated, and the thousands of marked and unmarked graves there lay untouched for decades. The land eventually became part of the...

   A Chinook salmon cuts through the clear, cold waters of the Deschutes River of Central Oregon, his iridescent red scales glinting in the sunlight. And he’s not alone. He is just one of thousands of salmon returning to the spawning grounds where they were born. Today, Chinook are the largest living...

   Old Goa, also known as Velha Goa, was once the capital of the Portuguese territories in India before the capital was shifted to Panaji. Several churches, convents, and other historical buildings still stand at the former capital. However, some have been lost over time. During the mid th century,...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we spend some time with some celebrity trees one in Washington DC and one in Berlin that have left an impact on all who visit them. Today’s stories are brought...

   If you ever find yourself in Japan, try this little experiment. Ask a local to explain the special appeal of takitate gohan freshly cooked white rice. Not about how filling it is, or its versatility as a complement to savory or sour dishes. Ask about the taste, the texture, and the aroma. There’s...

   Slow Food’s Plant a Seed Kit is an initiative that seeks to get Ark of Taste seeds rare, endangered, diverse and distinctive foods into home gardens. And every purchased kit pays for a free kit for a schoolhouse garden. For , the kit includes four grains to grow at a garden scale: Cocke’s...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit the city of Melbourne, where every tree was given a barcode and email address in so people could report when it needed maintenance or attention....

   This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. In the wake of North America’s recent solar eclipse, another historic natural event is on the horizon. From late April through June , the largest brood of year cicadas, known as...

   Indigenous Brazilians have fermented alcoholic beverages from the cassava root for thousands of years. These beer like beverages go by names like cauim, caxiri, and tarub . Fermentation is an important step in cassava processing the raw root has chemicals that can turn into cyanide in the human...

   The origins of Germany’s Maultaschen are deliciously devious. Legend has it that, in the late Middle Ages, a lay brother named Jakob invented the stuffed pasta dumplings at the Maulbronn Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site founded in by Cistercian monks in southwest Germany. One direct...

   In , absinthe was outlawed in France. In the small mountain town of Pontarlier, the world capital of absinthe, the news devastated the livelihoods of thousands of local workers. Nearly all the town’s distilleries closed their doors or relocated. But one producer, Distillerie Guy, remained open,...