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About The Atlas Obscura
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About the Atlas Obscura
Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you're looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you'll find them.
The Atlas Obscura is not just about collecting oddities. In an age where everything seems to have been explored and there is nothing new to be found, the Atlas Obscura celebrates a different way of traveling, and a different lens through which to view the world.
The Atlas Obscura depends on our community of far-flung explorers to find and report back about the world's wonders and curiosities. If you have been to, know of, or have heard about a place that belongs in the Atlas Obscura, we want you to tell us about it. Anyone and everyone is welcome and encouraged to nominate places for inclusion, and to edit content already in the Atlas.
Thanks for stopping by, and good exploring!
Email us at info@atlasobscura.com
Who the heck are we? Meet the Atlas Obscura Team!
Joshua Foer
Founder, C.E.O
Joshua Foer is the co-founder the Atlas Obscura. By day, he is a freelance science journalist who writes about wondrous, curious, and esoteric subjects like lightning strike survivors, amnesiacs, brain-computer interfaces, micrographic writing, naive chimpanzees, and the Bosnian "pyramids" hoax. He is also the secretary of the Athanasius Kircher Society, which has been on a bit of an extended hiatus recently. His main project right now is finishing up a book about how he became the 2006 United States Memory Champion. It'll be published next year.
Dylan Thuras
Founder, C.O.O.
Dylan Thuras is the co-founder of the Atlas, and a film maker and world traveler in search of the weird and curious across the globe. He recently spent a year living in Budapest and traveling throughout Eastern Europe in search of the obscure and wondrous. He also runs and write the travel and curiosities site CuriousExpeditions.org, along with his co-author and soon-to-be wife Michelle Enemark. In addition to his other projects he is currently working on a short documentary about wax anatomical models, a graphic novel about the London beer flood of 1816, and many other foolish endeavors.
Annetta Black
Senior Editor, Death Guild Liaison
Annetta Black blames her wanderlust on a childhood stint in Saudi Arabia and travels through Europe at the age of seven. A world traveler, compulsive reader, and committed history dork, since then she's followed the paths of mercenaries in Tuscany, looked up dead explorers in the Netherlands, had monkeys on her head in Bali, and is convinced that travel is a gateway drug to a serious history habit. On the road, she is obsessed with the rough edges of the past, and the hidden stories that define a place. Her most recent travels were in SouthEast Asia (see monkeys, above). She has a crush on Fridtjof Nansen and a thing for door knockers.Seth Teicher
Social Media Manager
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Seth Teicher's initial curiosity for far-off places grew out of a fascination with an over-sized world atlas that his father kept in his office. Poring over maps of the world, he knew that exploration was in his blood. Since then Seth has been lucky enough to travel to 23 countries, experience wilderness backpacking in the Shenandoah Mountains, a safari in Kenya, and a three-month National Outdoor Leadership School expedition in the Brazilian Amazon wilderness, where he navigated rivers for weeks at a time, and warded off foot fungus and relentless ant colonies. Later, Seth spent six months living in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he got in touch with a slightly more cosmopolitan side of Latin America. Seth is the Atlas's social media wrangler and temporarily makes due with getting lost in the annals of Atlas Obscura, while he daydreams of new travels and adventures from the Mediterranean to a return to Latin America.
Tre Witkowski
Writer/Editor
Tre grew up in a micro-sized town in the California wine country. After exploring as much as she could on her bicycle and in the back of her parents VW van, true wanderlust kicked in at the age of 12 when she went on a school trip to London. In the last dozen years she's explored 26 countries and become curiously fascinated with doom and eccentrics. Tre spends her time scheming for Atlas Obscura, remodeling her houseboat and dreaming of her next great escape... the Baltic States by motorcycle.M. Rebekah Otto
Writer/Editor
M. Rebekah Otto lives in Berkeley, CA. Her work has been published in The Believer and The New Yinzer. She is the Associate Books Editor of the Rumpus. Her interests include nineteenth-century medicine, education policy, and farmstead cheese.Sofy H. Solomon
Writer/Editor
Sofy H. Solomon was born and raised in Auburn, Alabama to parents from Eritrea and Ethiopia. She has an undying love for her hometown, as well as a passion for other cultures and places. Sofy loves working on collaborative projects in order to complete shared goals. One of her lifelong dreams is to become a travel guide, which led to the creation of her first film, Bridging Waters, a documentary about the first peace park in the Middle East, on the Jordan-Israel border. Sofy is well-traveled, largely due to her "crazy dad" who took her and her sister on multiple two-month-long road trips through 46 US States and 6 Canadian provinces, as well as on a 10-day trip through 5 European countries. In her free time she plays the cello and rides the unicycle.
Anhie Nguyen
Writer/Editor
Anhie Nguyen lives in Los Angeles, CA, where she spends her free time exploring internet art, pseudoscience and unusual architecture. Though Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Ghent, Belgium are among her favorite cities, she insists that her home state of Florida is the most bizarre place she's ever experienced. Consequently, her next quest is to find the elusive Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades.Sarah Brumble
Writer/Editor
Being of extremely diminutive stature, Sarah "Little" Brumble first escaped her hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia by secreting herself away in a stranger's carry-on baggage. These days, when not sailing through shark-infested waters, walking into Nigeria, or visiting almost every state in the Union (including Canada), she tarries forth armed with a dry sense of humor and an unreliable camera to record the bizarre, better-than-fiction aspects of life's daily adventures. Of her many and varied pursuits, Sarah can most often be found sweating profusely in the wordsmith's forge, ogling furniture, and riding her bicycle without a helmet.Clint Butler
Writer/Editor
Born and raised in Texas, but nomadic in nature, among other travels Clint has spent a summer living in Japan and is soon heading to South America, for a natural building and sustainable living internship all the while sending back feild reports for the Atlas Obscura. From there he plans to head to Peru where he will spend time with Shipibo healers in the Amazon. After that the intrepid Clint plans to end up on the west coast for a "long overdue" introduction to surfing. Clint likes campy movies and all things occult, camping in the forest, and swimming in the river.Kalia Kuligowski
Writer/Editor/Sloth Wrangler
Kalia grew up overseas due to her father's employment with the State Department and exploring new places is something she loved to do from a young age. This past summer Kalia got to explore the Caribbean side of Costa Rica while volunteering for two weeks at a sloth rehabilitation center.Kalia also recently received a Bachelor's Degree in History from Utah Valley University and is currently a graduate student at Simmons College in Boston in the Library and Information Science program. In her words "I'm hoping a degree in 'how to find information' will satisfy my need for knowledge." Wish her good luck on her finals!
Ryan Matsunaga
Writer/Editor/Zombie Killer
Ryan, better known as Genki, enjoys long walks on beaches made of lava, guitar solos, explosions, and other occurrences of general badassery. His hobbies include raising raptors, killing zombies, and exploring the far reaches of the galaxy. He hopes to one day conquer the known universe. Is secretly Batman, but don't tell anyone. He has also never spelled Wendsday right, ever.Trevor David
Writer/Editor/Science Correspondent
Trevor David is an aspiring astronomer and native New Yorker living in Los Angeles. Aside from his interests in science fiction and the history of science and technology, he nurtures an appreciation for architecture and is a devoted follower of ice hockey. His most memorable scientific experience was bearing witness to observations in which a giant laser beam was reflected off mirrors left on the moon by Apollo astronauts.Sean Mattison
Senior Film Liaison
Born in Paris, raised in Washington, D.C., Sean inherited the travel bug early on and has embraced a decidedly nomadic existence ever since he was sent on his very first adventure to the nearby 7-11 as a child. A vintage camera enthusiast with a penchant for fine wines and exotic pets, Sean is currently working on the Atlas Obscura video series and writing a feature film about the history and nature of color. Having covered vast swaths of Europe and the Americas, he hopes to travel across Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Asia one day soon.
For assorted visual stimulation or to send anonymous gifts and/or bags of pirate's gold, venture to seanmattison.com or follow him on twitter at @seanmattison!
Michelle Enemark
Project Manager
The goal of Michelle Enemark is to unearth the extraordinary past through travel and a wonder of the natural world. She documents what she discovered at Curious Expeditions. Michelle tries to show the forgotten bits of the world, be they lost pieces of history, forgotten museums, or elements of the natural world that have been ignored or overlooked. Michelle is also a co-founder of Observatory, an event/gallery space in Brooklyn.
She spends her time mounting insects, animal skeletons, painting natural history scenes, and generally filling her tiny Brooklyn apartment with natural specimens. One day she hopes to have her own natural history museum. Her passions are cabinets of curiosity, traveling to places she's never been, dusty, overlooked museums, and the Maine woods.
Wythe Marschall
Senior Editor
Wythe Marschall lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of Bennington College and the MFA fiction-writing program at Brooklyn College.Wythe is multiclassed: By day, he currently writes for Saatchi & Saatchi. By night, he teaches English at Brooklyn College. Wythe's stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Wishtank, 5_Trope, Knock, Splinter Generation, The Kennesaw Review, The Brooklyn Review, Locus Novus, and elsewhere. He is a senior editor of Atlas Obscura and Pomp & Circumstance (www.pomponline.com), as well as an editor of and contributor to the Two Blue Wolves collection (www.sparrowhall.com).
For more riveting biographical data, visit Wythe's website: http://chronolect.com/
Adam Varga
Web Developer/Minor Celebrity
I originally let Dylan write my bio, but that kid has terrrrible grammar. Never again. Seriously. adamvarga.com
Aaron Taylor Waldman
Designer
Aaron Taylor Waldman (or ATW as he is known to friends which is everyone since he is a really nice and awesome guy) is a hiker, beard grower, and designer for such brands as Audi, Southpaw, Beefeater, Mao Beer and Delta Airlines as well as the Atlas Obscura. See more of his fabulous work at taylorwaldman.com
Atlas Obscura in the Press
"Atlas Obscura is really the type of site that should be labeled as not safe for work. Not because there's anything offensive about it - don't worry, you can click safely - but because the posts make you really, really want to get out of the office." - Time.com (7/7/09)
"Even if you don't have time to actually visit the places in the atlas, you can wile away that six-hour layover in Charlotte just browsing through all the bizarre, fascinating entries. Indulge your wanderlust. Explore!" - Economist (6/28/09)
"If you like Loverboy records and French milkshakes, then you'll love the newly launched AtlasObscura.com... As a co-founder, Joshua Foer, put it, the site is a catalog of all the 'wondrous, curious, and esoteric places' that don't make it into your average guidebook. Like the world's biggest manmade hole in eastern Siberia. Or the Sonorous Stones of Ringing Rocks Park, in Pennsylvania. Or the Pigeon Towers of Isfahan. Or Carhenge in Nebraska." - New York Times Frugal Traveler (6/17/09)
"Every city has that one weird place -- the museum of bizarre artifacts, the out-of-place sculpture, a historical landmark for a not-very-historical event. Enter Atlas Obscura, 'a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica' and a community-generated clearinghouse of strangedelights." - EWPicks: Today's Best in Pop Culture (7/5/09)
"When it comes to travel, think outside the book... Self-mummified monks; a house built of paper; a museum filled with the genitals of every known mammal. The world is full of breathtaking places nobody has ever heard of." - Metro (7/15/09)
"Despite the reported death of the hipster, the Atlas has his fingerprints all over it: high design with an antiquarian wash; a tone that is ironic but sincere about the possibility of magic; a somewhat Victorian approach to science (it essentially places rare specimens under a microscope and catalogues them); and, despite operating like Wikipedia - anyone can add or edit text and photos - it's branded as club or society, placing it firmly in the geek-chic category. In other words, it's a travel Web site for the post-Wes Anderson generation." - New Yorker (7/20/09)
"Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are cataloging the world's weirdest places to foster a new age of curiosity... Obviously, they both share a fascination with the world's moldiest, weirdest corners. But the sensibility, if anything, is ancient, harking back to Wunderkammern, or Wonder Cabinets." -
Good Magazine (6/12/09)
"Introducing the Atlas Obscura, an online gateway to the world's most spectacular nooks and crannies, ready now to send you to the far reaches of the globe. There are a lot of travel websites out there, but we like this one becauseÉ it's sort of like a wanderer's Wikipedia." - Urban Daddy (7/17/09)
"If your tastes run to the more explicitly unusual, check the Atlas Obscura for thumbnail guides to the world's miniature cities, bone churches, paper homes, and, naturally, books bound in human skin." - GQ/Details Fall Trends Report (8/12/09)
"Sure, you can go to the Louvre in Paris and elbow your way past the crowds for a brief glimpse of the Mona Lisa, but might we suggest something a bit more off the beaten path? How about the Calder Mercury Fountain - beautiful yet highly toxic! - in Barcelona? Or, the 1931 giant duck that used to be a poultry store, located in Long Island, N.Y.? These, plus many other amazing, fascinating and just plain weird places, can be found on the Web Site Atlas Obscura... It's impressively detailed, divided up among the seven continents with a multitude of subcategories (such as "Horticultural Marvels," "Eccentric Homes" and "Inspired Inventions"), and easy to navigate. Plus, they welcome contributions, so you have an excuse for your next far-flung vacation." - The Observer's Very Short List (8/21/09)
"In short, this is the Wikipedia of the craziest places on earth." - De Morgen
Named one of "95 websites you should totally bookmark today" Ð PCPlus Magazine & TechRadar.com (10/4/09)
Named one of 16 best educational web sites - Telegraph.co.uk (11/11/09)
Frequently Asked Questions
WHAT KIND OF PLACES ARE IN THE ATLAS OBSCURA?
To merit inclusion in the Atlas Obscura, a place should appeal to our sense of wonder and curiosity. That said, we are not interested in oddity for oddity's sake, or that which is merely "quirky" or a "roadside attraction." We're looking for places that expand our sense of what is possible and tell us something about ourselves, and about the wider world in which we live.
WHO CAN EDIT INFORMATION IN THE ATLAS OBSCURA?
Anyone can add or edit information in the Atlas Obscura, though we encourage you to become a member of the Atlas Obscura community so that you can track edits, comments, and the popularity of your entries.
I KNOW OF A WONDROUS, CURIOUS, OR ESOTERIC PLACE THAT IS NOT IN THE ATLAS OBSCURA. CAN I ADD IT?
We're counting on you! We've tried to make the process of submitting places to the Atlas as simple and straightforward as possible. In order to ensure the highest level of quality, all new entries and edits will be reviewed by an editor before going living in the Atlas. Please be aware that it may take as much as 24 hours before your changes appear on the site.
WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ATLAS ENTRY?
All Atlas Obscura entries should be written in the third-person. We aim for a tone that is matter-of-fact and encyclopedic. For an entry to be included in the Atlas Obscura, it must be a specific place or group of places that can actually be visited. Sites that are only occasionally open to the public are welcome, but must be noted as such. We ask that all submissions to the Atlas Obscura be original content, written by you.
WHO'S BEHIND THE ATLAS OBSCURA?
The Atlas Obscura was founded in 2009 by Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras.
HOW DO I CONTACT THE ATLAS OBSCURA?
For general e-mails, please contact us at info@atlasobscura.com.
