Miles Griffis    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 , . In the winter of , a bird went viral. This nonbinary cardinal is flipping gender the bird, announced the queer news site...

N.C. Stevens    Maharani Mahansar Heritage Liquor is the modern manifestation of a nine generation family tradition that has spanned monarchy, colonization, and independence in India’s northern state of Rajasthan. The Shekhawat family, descended from a prominent baron or thikanedar of Jaipur State in the early...

April White    The former Ca’ Vendramin water pumping plant houses the Regional Land Reclamation Museum of Ca’ Vendramin. It is also the headquarters of the Ca’ Vendramin Foundation which manages, in addition to museum activities, the Delta and Lagoons International Laboratory which studies the ecology of the Po...

Charis McGowan    The Monument of Revolution in Ruma’s city center was erected in as a symbol of cultural significance. The sculpture was constructed by ivojin Karape iÄ , Cveta DaviÄ o, and Mi a David and designed to decorate an area for communal gatherings and daily life. Composed of concrete elements...

The Podcast Team    Beginning in , American multimillionaire and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of over, public libraries worldwide. These buildings quickly became important establishments within their communities, particularly in the Midwest. The Carnegie Library of Crawfordsville,...

Olivia Young    In celebration of Earth Day, we went digging into the Atlas Obscura archives to find some of the world’s most surprising stories. In the era of climate change, those stories can be scary, but they can also be hopeful. From the beaches of Sri Lanka to the fields of Ethiopia to the wetlands of Brazil...

Nicky Nielsen    Tufa, a type of limestone, can grow, as calcium carbonate, usually carried by water, accumulates. This tends to be seen occurring naturally, but this fountain in Croatia proves that the process can be manipulated by humans. In front of ibenik’s Church of Our Lady there is a simple fountain. It...

The Podcast Team    A clutch of rafts floats on the ocean horizon, just visible from the shore of Rapa Nui. It’s hard to determine from this distance, but they vaguely define the starting point of one of the island’s most anticipated events: an annual triathlon. But this is no ordinary triathlon. Spectators on shore...

The Podcast Team    After moving to St. Louis, Missouri from Nigeria as a teen, Ono Ikanone longed to stay connected to his homeland. In , that desire led him to trade in a career as an engineer and marketing consultant to become a restaurateur. Levels is a dream that Ono has turned into reality along with his...

Meg St-Esprit    In the s, a man named Lonnie Coffman set out to build a dinosaur themed mini golf course in the town of Apple Valley, California. For more than a decade, he labored on a prehistoric wonderland, complete with foot tall creatures rendered in concrete. Coffman was more concerned with whimsy...

Robert M. Thorson    Scallions are by far one the most famous crops of Yilan County, Taiwan. An essential staple in Taiwanese cooking, these fragrant alliums flavor the region’s much loved scallion pancakes. While just about any restaurant in town will serve up local scallions, gastronauts looking to go deeper should...

Colin Dickey    Aphrodite’s Rock, also known as Petra tou Romiou, is a prominent geological formation located along the coast of Paphos, Cyprus. The rock is an iconic landmark and holds significant cultural and mythological importance. According to Greek mythology Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was...

   Although the modern day city of Freetown is a sprawling metropolis of over a million people, many of the city’s neighborhoods started as independent towns. The original Freetown occupied only a few square miles at the base of Tower Hill and Mount Aureol. To mark the boundaries of their town the...

   Today, Punta Rassa is encompassed by the toll plaza restaurants, a hotel, and condos. Before, it was one of the original settlements in Southwest Florida. During the second Seminole War from to , Fort Dulaney was built here, only to be abandoned and later destroyed by a hurricane. The...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, Dylan sits down with How To creator and host John Wilson about his travels, his favorite places, and his HBO series that is part documentary, part memoir, part...

   The Orangery still stands although Panshanger Hall was demolished in . It is the only part of the house still standing. Despite being fenced in for protection, visitors can still get a good view from not far away. It stands in woodland above a series of connected lakes in Panshanger Park. ...

   Surrounded by a host of abundantly fragrant blooming trees, shrubs, and flowers is the artistry of Ivan’s Highins’ sculptures. Dragons, monks, dancing troupes, an enchanted castle, and dozens more fantastic forms amaze and delight visitors as they troll through these hidden, yet well groomed...

   A dried up lake bed sits in the heart of the Australian Outback, more than miles from the nearest road or settlement. Beneath its dusty surface, multiple fossilized skeletons have been lying here for thousands even millions of years. But though they’re very large, these old bones do not belong...

   On the morning of July , , a fleet of five dozen Dutch and Danish whaling ships assembled in Smeerenburgfjorden literally blubber town fjord in the northwestern portion of the Svalbard Archipelago. The Dutch and the Danes, alongside the English, had made their mark on the desolate and...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit a medieval castle, which sits just outside of Myrtle Beach, that would feel out of place if not for its charm. We tell the story of the eccentric couple...

   Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit a one room museum located in the basement of a church turned community arts center, crammed with mementos from a pretty spectacular period in history...

   Filing teeth is not exactly unheard of in ancient societies. The Vikings were known to carve grooves into their incisors for status or intimidation, similar to the Maya of Central America and Zappo Zap people in Congo, among others. But while examining Viking skulls from the island of Gotland in...

   This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets, and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere, a latticework of...

   On an unseasonably cold day in late March, I took a nearly empty ferry to Governor’s Island in New York Harbor. The sun was shining, but a brutal, frigid wind meant it was hardly a day for a picnic, a popular reason to visit the island in the summer. I disembarked onto a nearly deserted island, one...

   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,...