Author: Dylan

Mud Volcanoes of Azerbaijan

Home to nearly a third of the world’s mud volcano’s, Azerbaijan features a messy, bubbling, and sometime explosive landscape

In 2001, in Azerbaijan, something unexpected happened. The ground began to move in an unusual way…
“It looked as though an animal was trying to get out of the ground…There was a big explosion, and a huge flame started coming from the hillside… The flame was unbelievably big, about three hundred metres high. It was surrounded by dense, black smoke, and lots of mud was being thrown into the air.” Visible from 15 kilometers away, three days later the flames were still burning.
What had taken place was an eruption, but not one of magma, but of mud. Known as “mud volcanos” they form in places where pockets of underground gas have found a weak spot in the earth where they can force their way to the surface. Because they are not caused by magma, the mud volcano’s rather than being hot, can be very cold indeed, often just above freezing. Over a thousand mud volcanoes are known to exist in the world, and some 400 of those are in the coastal area of Azerbaijan.
While mud volcano’s (also known as “sedimentary volcanoes”) never grow to the size of a normal volcano, topping out at around 10 km in diameter and 700 meters in height, (“among the largest mud volcanoes in the world are Boyuk Khanizadagh and Turaghai both in Azerbaijan) they do occasionally get the chance to show off, as happened in 2001
Every 20 years or so, one of these mud/gas volcanoes will ignite, deep below the surface and create a massive explosion. While generally not dangerous to people, as they are far outside of most city centers, it is believed that six shepherds and over 2000 sheep were killed by a mud volcano in Bozdagh, Azerbaijan. There is however, a silver lining to having a country covered in mud volcanoes. Mud volcanoes are closely associated with hydrocarbon and petrochemical stores underground, hence the gas trying to escape to the surface.
Some of these gas leaks are constantly on fire, shooting small perpetual flames into the air. Some believe that these perpetual flames are strongly connected to the appearance of the Zoroastrians in Azerbaijan some 2,000 years ago.

Read more about Mud Volcanoes of Azerbaijan on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Natural Wonders, Fiery Wonders, Martian Landscapes, Geological Oddities
Location: Baku, Azerbaijan
Edited by: Dylan

Cesare Lombroso’s Museum of Criminal Anthropology

Once only open to academics, “Lombroso’s Museum” has opened its doors to the public revealing the astonishing collection of an infamous criminologist

As the criminologist Cesare Lombroso examined the skull of the autopsied the body of Giuseppe Villela, the notorious Italian criminal he had just dissected, he discovered a cranial anomaly known as a “median occipital fossette.” Lombroso was suddenly overtaken by flash of insight. As he would write many years later
“The sight of that fossette suddenly appeared to me like a broad plain beneath an infinite horizon, the nature of the criminal was illuminated, he must have reproduced in our day the traits of primitive man going back as far as the carnivores.”
What Lombroso felt he had discovered would become his legacy and known throughout the world as the “Italian school of criminology.” Lombroso felt that he now understood the true ‘scientific’ nature of crime and criminals. Put simply, according to Lombroso you didn’t learn to become a criminal, you were born to become one. Also called “biological determinism,” Lombroso’s theory of “anthropological criminology” and the upbeat sounding “positivist criminology” was that criminals were a kind of evolutionary throwback, physically de-evolved, and unfortunately for them they couldn’t change because it was part of their biology.
Physical characteristics tied to being a “natural born criminal” were many and included large jaws, forward projection of jaw, low sloping foreheads, high cheekbones, flattened or upturned nose, handle-shaped ears, large chins, hawk-like noses or fleshy lips, hard shifty eyes, scanty beard or baldness, insensitivity to pain and long arms.
Lombroso also believed that race was an indicator of evolution with blacks being the least evolved and whites being the most evolved, or in his words “only we white people have reached the ultimate symmetry of bodily form.” Interestingly despite these beliefs (which it should be added were commonly held at the time) Lombroso was not a particularly virulent man and was a believer in reform rather than punishment, and was against capital punishment.
As part of his studies Lombroso collected numerous specimens both biological such as numerous skulls for study, but also weapons used in crimes and other criminological relics. In 1892 Lombroso opened a museum in Turin (narrowly escaping having his collection seized by Rome) bragging “our school has attracted and convinced the best scientists in Europe who did not disdain to send us, as proof of their support, the most valuable documents in their collections.”
Lomborso was a lifelong collector described by his daughter as “Although untidy and neglectful of what he possessed, Lombroso was a born collector – while he walked, while he talked, while he was engaged in discussion; in town, in the country, in court, in prison, on his travels, he was always studying something that no one could see, thus amassing or buying a wealth of curiosities, which at the time no one, not even he himself, could have placed a value on…”
Among the collections he acquired for the museum are hundreds of skulls of soldiers and civilians, natives from ‘far-off lands’ as well as those of criminals and madmen, dozens of complete skeletons, brains, and wax models of “natural criminals” as well as “drawings, photos, criminal evidence, anatomical sections of “madmen and criminals” and work produced by criminals in the last century, the Gallows of Turin, which were in use until the city’s final hanging in 1865 and the possessions of a man known as White Stag, a renowned impostor who convinced Europe he was a great Native American chief.”
The collection is topped off by the head of Lombroso himself, “perfectly preserved in a glass chamber.”

Read more about Cesare Lombroso’s Museum of Criminal Anthropology on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Museums and Collections, Wonder Cabinets, Strange Science, Medical Museums, Unique Collections, Memento Mori, Hoaxes and Pseudoscience
Location: Torino, Italy
Edited by: Dylan

Toyama, Japan | Watery Wonders

Watasenia scintillans, or the Firefly Squid, is only 3 inches long, but packs a stunning feature in that small package. At the end of their tentacles are special organs called photophores that light up like glow sticks at a rave. In the Toyama Bay, in the central Japan Sea, the squid are found in fantastic abundance. Normally living at 1200 feet underwater, a v shaped canyon in Toyama bay pushes the current, and the squid, to the surface in massive numbers where, forced up, the millions of squids turn the bay into a writhing, gleaming blue froth.

Fished by the ton from March to June, when the fishing boats dump the nets onto the boat floor the squirming squids light up and turn the boats themselves into blue beacons. Thankfully, for the curious visitors, one need not sign up to work on a Japanese fishing-boat tour to see the phenomenon. Sightseeing boats depart from the Namerikawa fishing port around 3am to see the nets 1 to 2 km offshore.

It should be noted that Namerikawa is also home to the world’s only museum dedicated to the firefly squid.

Homestead, Florida | Outsider Architecture

There are many motivations to create one’s own castle. Divine inspiration, as a way of cheating death, as a monument to human ability, or simply a compulsive inability to stop building. However few motivators are as strong as the sorrow of lost love. When Latvian Ed Leedskalnin was jilted by his sweet sixteen the day before their wedding, it was to send him on a mysterious and marvelous path of creation.

The Coral Castle, originally dubbed Rock Gate Park by Leedskalnin, is perhaps the most mysterious of all the world’s self built castles. After his heartbreak, Ed moved to the US and eventually to Florida where he began working on his home and great monument to lost love. Born in 1887 to a family of Latvian stone masons, the 5 foot 100 pound Ed used his inherited skills to move blocks of Oolitic Limestone (fossilized coral) over 25 feet tall and weighing over 30 tons. This makes some of the stones in the Coral castle taller than in Stonehenge and heavier than the heaviest stone in the great pyramid of Giza.

The castle contains many wonders including a sundial, a rocking stone, a 500 pound heart-shaped stone table (a “Valentine” for his lost love), and a 9 ton gate made to spin with just a light touch. Ed was secretive, working on the castle mostly at night, and keeping to a policy of letting no one see his working methods. This led to much speculation that Ledeskalnin used some magical or ancient power to move the giant stones. Perhaps what is more impressive than imagined powers is that this small Latvian man spent his entire life cutting and moving these massive stones as a monument to his lost “Sweet Sixteen.”

Join us on Obscura Day – Marth 20th, 2010 – at the Coral Catle for a tour of one the world’s most unusual self-built monuments to lost love.

Tiffany Glass Mural “The Dream Garden”

Mural made of 100,000 pieces of hand blown glass, and until recently, the largest glass mural in the US

East of the Curtis Center is a one of a kind mural and gazing pool called “The Dream Garden”.
Designed by Louis C. Tiffany and based on a Maxfield Parrish landscape, it took 6 months to install in 1916. The mural is 15 feet by 49 feet made up of 100,00 pieces of glass in over 260 color tones making it arguably the largest Tiffany piece in the world (though the Tiffany art glass dome located in Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural center certainly has a claim.) Dream Garden was the largest glass mural in the country until 2007 when it was surpassed by the Wing Lung Bank Mural in Alhambra, CA.
Though there was an attempt to sell the mural for 9 million dollars to a casino owner in the late 1990s, Philadelphia designated the mural a “historic object” putting a stop to the sale. Eventually ownership of the mural was handed over to be jointly shared by four Philadelphia cultural institutions.

Read more about Tiffany Glass Mural “The Dream Garden” on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Unique Collections, Unusual Monuments, Peculiar Fountains, Architectural Oddities
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Edited by: Dylan

Budapest, Hungary | Medical Museums

The Semmelweis Medical Museum contains some terrific objects: an anatomical Venus, an early X-ray machine, and the obligatory shrunken head, all housed in the very building in which Dr. Semmelwies was born. But the most interesting element of the museum is the story of Semmelweis himself.

In the mid-1800s, Semmelweis worked in the maternity ward of a clinic. Women in maternity wards all over the world were experiencing a mysterious disease called, “childbed sickness,” today known as puerperal fever. As many as 30% of mothers died from this disease every month. Semmelweis was tormented over the deaths of so many women, but couldn’t figure out the cause.

One day, a colleague died shortly after performing an autopsy, and in a flash of insight, Semmelweis realized that his colleague had had a cut on his finger when he preformed the dissection. It became obvious to Semmelweis that doctors moving immediately from cadavers to pregnant women was not the best idea.

Semmelweis implemented a strict hand-washing policy in his clinic, requiring doctors to wash with chloride of lime, an antiseptic. He also instituted an instrument-washing policy. The death-rate fell noticeably.

Semmelweis reported his findings to the great Medical Association of Vienna, but this was several years before Pasteur’s experiments confirmed germ theory: Even Semmelweis himself was not sure why his discovery worked. So to most of the medical community, hand-washing simply didn’t make sense. Semmelweis’s discovery was soundly rejected, and in a cruel twist of irony, Semmelweis died – of the very disease he spent his life trying to prevent in others – before seeing his discoveries accepted by the medical community.

Join us on Obscura Day – Marth 20th, 2010 – at the Semmelweis Medical Museum, to tour the terrific objects in the Museum including a wax “anatomical Venus,” an early X-ray machine, and even a shrunken head, all housed in the very building in which Dr. Semmelwies was born.”

United Kingdom, Europe | Purveyors of Curiosities

Since 2006, the Last Tuesday Society, under the direction of its “Chancellor,” Viktor Wynd, and his father and Regent of the Society, Silas Wynd, have been putting on dandy-oriented art shows, events, and “crying parties” in which attendees come for “an evening of exquisite misery,” all of which come generously sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin.

The latest Hendrick’s-sponsored project from the Last Tuesday Society and its Chancellor is the Little Shop of Horrors. The Shop, “a vainglorious attempt to recreate a 17th-century Kunstkamera,” sits in “deepest darkest hackney, amongst the grime of one the greatest centers of urban deprivation and poverty in Europe” and sells curios.

A further description of the Shop: “…Underground in a basement soaked blood red, in old museum cabinets lurks a collection of wonder-inspiring objects, recreating a sense of the aesthetic that judges objects purely on what they look like, juxtaposing modern sex toys with antique dolls, anatomical specimens, skulls and ivory carvings, carnivorous plants with mortuary tables, McDonald’s happy toys, tin toys and ivory phalluses.”

As it is a sponsored store, it is unclear how long the Shop will stay open. But while it does, it offers several items of real interest—from medical specimens such as human fetuses and shrunken heads to carnivorous plants and fragile orchids.

Brooklyn, New York | Subterranean Sites

Unbeknownst to the thousands of people who walk and drive along the busy streets of downtown Brooklyn every day, they are treading on a 165 year old secret. At 17 feet high, 21 feet wide and 1,611 feet long, it is a big secret indeed, and one filled with greed, murder and corruption.

The tunnel, built in 1844 by Cornelius Vanderbilt, was an attempt to avoid incidents of trains striking errant Brooklynites. It was to be the first underground, or “grade-separated” transportation system: the world’­s very first subway.

The work was done almost entirely by Irish immigrants. According to an 1844 Brooklyn Eagle article, when the Irish workers were told by a British contractor they would have to miss church and work on Sundays, an Irishman pulled a gun, shot the Brit, and the group buried him behind the wall of the tunnel – where presumably his body still resides today. In a corrupt deal, the tunnel was capped up and forgotten by the end of the 1850’s.

The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel was rediscovered by a curious twenty year old named Bob Diamond in 1980. Diamond found the tunnel by reviewing microfiche at the local library and locating an old blueprint in the borough presidentà­s office. Brooklyn’s answer to Indiana Jones, Diamond went down through the manhole, dug through a layer of dirt and broke down the brick and mortar between him and the tunnel.

Today you can still tour the tunnel and Bob Diamond, re-discoverer of the tunnel in 1980, is still giving the tours. You access the tunnel by filing down one by one through a manhole cover in the middle of busy Atlantic Avenue. Diamond is a wellspring of fantastic stories about the origin of the tunnel and how he came to find it. The tunnel is a marvel, and walking through the 165 year old underground passage is an experience like little else in New York.

Join us on Obscura Day – Marth 20th, 2010 – and the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association for an exploration of Vanderbilt’s lost subway tunnel, right under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Rediscovered by an urban explorer in 1980, the tunnel remains one of New York’s great secrets.”

Austin, Texas | Fascinating Fauna

The Congress Avenue Bridge, which spans Town Lake in downtown Austin, is home to the largest urban bat colony in North America. The colony is estimated at 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats. Each night from mid-March to November, the bats emerge from under the bridge at dusk to blanket the sky as they head out to forage for food. This event has become one of the most spectacular and unusual tourist attractions in Texas.

The most spectacular bat flights are during hot, dry August nights, when multiple columns of bats emerge. There are several points from which to view the event, and an information kiosk is located on the north bank of the river, just east of the bridge.

Join us on Obscura Day – March 20th, 2010 – at the Congress Street bridge to watch the nighttime exodus of the Mexican Free-tailed Bats as they pour into the sky to hunt insects.

Boston, Massachusetts | Medical Museums

“Mortui Vivos Docent; The Dead Teach the Living.” So said Dr. John Collins Warren. Like many medical men of his day, Dr. Warren collected anatomical and pathological specimens to help in his studies. After his retirement in 1847, he left his excellent collection of unusual anatomical and pathological specimens to Harvard University. While the collection is said to contain some 15,00 specimens, only a handful are on display to the public. Exhibited in four rather uninspired display cases on the 5th floor of the Countway Library are a few incredible specimens.

Included in the museum is the phrenological collection of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, including a cast of Spurzheim’s own skull, the Dr. W. T. G. Morton ether inhaler used in the first ether assisted surgery, a pair of conjoined fetal skeletons, papier-maché anatomical models of eyes by Azoux and a beautiful Beauchene or “exploded” skull.

Without question, the most well known, and perhaps most curious, item in the collection is the skull of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a 13-pound tamping iron blown through his head and lived to tell the tale. Gage’s altered personality after the incident helped doctors begin to understand the localized nature of personality and identity.

Join us on Obscura Day, – March 20th, 2010 – when Dominic Hall, curator of Warren Anatomical Museum will conduct a special Obscura Day tour of the museum’s historic collection of anatomical preparations and medical instrumentation and models, including the phrenological collection of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, and the skull of Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman who became one of the most notable medical cases of the 19th century.

Wadsworth, Illinois | Outsider Architecture

The six-story-tall, 17,000-square-foot Gold Pyramid House in Wadsworth, Illinois has to be one of the most bizarre homes ever constructed. Its builders, Jim and Linda Onan explain in three nouns and two adjectives what their unique home represents: “Power, Gold, Mystery, Exotic, and Impressive.” The Onans are subscribers to the seventies cult theory of “pyramid power.” Their home is believed to be the largest 24-karat gold-plated object in North America.

Located on an island and surrounded by a giant moat, the Pyramid House has many remarkable features, including a 50-foot statue of King Tut, a metal palm tree and, a three car garage topped by three smaller pyramids.

Join the Atlas Obscura on Obscura Day – March 20th, 2010 – for a tour of the immaculate and eccentric Gold Pyramid House outside of Chicago. The six-story-tall, 17,000-square-foot house is located in Wadsworth, Illinois and is believed to be the largest 24-karat gold-plated object in North America. The home’s builder, Jim Onan, will lead a special Obscura Day tour.

Texas, US | Museums and Collections

The dime or dime store museum is by all accounts an endangered species. The first dime museum, “The American Museum,” was opened in 1841 by none other than P. T. Barnum himself. It represented a departure from high-class art and science museums, catering to a poorer crowd and offering items of a much more dubious nature.

Part of the appeal of the dime store museum lay in arguing about what was real and what was a “humbug,” as P. T. Barnum called a hoax or fake display. Feejee mermaids (a type of fake or “gaff” taxidermy made from a monkey and a fish, sewn together to form an incredibly ugly “mermaid”) mixed with real exotic animals, and scientific instruments sat next to a loom run by a dog. Unfortunately, Barnum’s American Museum burned to the ground in 1865.

Though many dime museums had disappeared by the 1920s, dime museums such as New York City’s Hubert’s Museum would remain open until the late 1960s. One of the best recreation dime museums, Baltimore’s American Dime Museum, opened in 1999 only to shutter its doors in 2007. So though it may not look like much at first, “Austin’s Museum of the Weird” is in fact a rare beast.

Created by artist-entrepreneur Steve Busti, the museum lives in the back of his store, the “Lucky Lizard,” and features many of the same types of curios you might have encountered in a turn-of-the-century dime museum, including a feejee mermaid. Among the other items shown are a a cyclops pig, a hand of glory (supposedly the dried and pickled hand of a man who has been hanged), live tarantulas, a two-headed chicken, shrunken heads, and mummies. Among the more recent additions are items from 1960s and 70s camp horror films, such as full-sized figures of Frankenstein and other classic monsters.

Though slightly more expensive than a dime, at only four dollars per adult and two dollar for kids, the Museum of the Weird happily continues the tradition of the dime store museum.

Michigan, US | Outsider Architecture

Tyree Guyton grew up in a Detroit that was still a thriving city, and his house was in a growing, middle-class neighborhood. But in 1967 when Tyree was 12 he witnessed the destructive effects of the 1967 Detroit riots, the result of social unrest over discrimination sparked by a police raid on a bar, which left 43 dead and 467 injured.

When Tyree returned to the same neighborhood once again as an adult after serving in the army things had only gotten worse. In his words his neighborhood, and Detroit in general, looked as if “a bomb went off.”

Started in 1986, Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project was his attempt to reclaim an area that had become so run-down and unsafe that people were afraid to walk through the area even during the daytime. Using paint, refuse from the neighborhood, and a small army of local kids, Tyree began transforming abandoned houses into massive works of art.

It has been a difficult road and despite the project having been featured everywhere from Oprah to the Today Show and considered a Detroit landmark, it was twice demolished by the city in 1991 and 1999. Tyree however was undaunted and simply began anew each time. Eventually the Wayne County Circuit Court ruled the Heidelberg Project was protected under the 1st Amendment.

The project occupies the entire block and is made up of some 22 individual art projects. Among the significant are the “Dotty Wotty House,” “Noah’s Ark,” and “Faces in the Hood,” portaits painted on car hoods set into the ground. Today, the project is known throughout the world and receives over 200,000 visitors a year and was elected to represent the United States in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Brisbane, Australia | Instruments of Science

Begun in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell, this experiment was meant to reveal the surprising properties of an everyday material: pitch. Pitch is the name of a number of hard tar-like substances and in this case bitumen was used. Though at room temperature pitch appears to be a solid and can be shattered by a hammer, it is in fact a very high-viscosity liquid, and Professor Parnell wanted to prove it.

Just getting ready to perform the experiment took years. First the Professor heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a sealed funnel. Then, he waited. For three years Parnell let the pitch settle in the funnel, until in 1930, when he felt the pitch was settled enough, he cut the bottom of the funnel, freeing the pitch to begin its mind-bogglingly slow downward escape.

Professor Parnell lived long enough to record only two drips – the first in 1938, eight years after the opening of the funnel – and the second, nine years later in 1947.

Parnell died in 1948, but the pitch experiment kept on going without him. As of 2009, the pitch has dripped only eight times. 79 years after the experiment was begun, the ninth drop is only now forming. Pitch has now been calculated to be roughly 230 billion times more viscous than water.

Curiously, because it only drips every 8 to 9 years, no one has ever actually seen a drop fall. A webcam was setup in 2000, but due to technical problems it missed the drip. The last drip was nine years ago, so the pitch is due to drop any day now. The webcam is currently set up and one can try their luck, and patience, at mms://drop.physics.uq.edu.au/PitchDropLive. If the virtual experience isn’t enough, you can see it in person at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Listed as the longest running lab experiment by Guinness World Records, the pitch experiment not only outlived its creator, but will likely outlive us all. It has been estimated that there is enough pitch to keep it dripping, ever so slowly, for another hundred years.

India, Asia | Inspired Inventions

On first appearance it doesn’t look like much, a 22 foot tall iron pillar, slowly rusting away in the middle of an empty square in Dehli, India. The surprise comes in learning its age, some 1600 years old, much older than one would expect for an iron column which, judging from other exposed iron, should have turned to a pile of dust long ago.

It was this ‘enigma’ which lead some people to include the Iron Ashoka pillar in a group of objects known as OOPArt’s or “out of place artifacts.” These objects are said to be in some way unreasonably futuristic for their time, as if they had come from another place and time. (Also known as an “anachronism” when something is placed out of its time period like man on a penny-farthing in 2010, or more specifically a prochronism when something is placed in an earlier context and would be impossible, like a light-bulb in the middle ages, or a cell-phone in the Victorian era.)

Some among these “out of place” artifacts have been shown to be outright hoaxes, such as the “Coso Artifact” a spark plug said to found embedded in a chunk of rock 500,000 years old. In fact it was a 1920s Champion spark plug which had developed a shell of iron oxide concretion rust around it. Some discoveries have turned out to be a case of underestimating the technological capabilities of people past, such as the antikythera mechanism an ancient mechanical computer from 100 B.C., which is known to be both real, and previously to its being discovered, would have been seen as an anachronism.

Happily, the iron Ashoka Pillar of Delhi falls in the second category. Despite being classed with item like the Coso Artifact, and though much was made of its 99.9999% iron purity so pure no one knew how they cast it, (in actually it is only 98% pure), of “ancient and lost” techniques in metallurgy, and of suggestions that it was made of some sort of futuristic or non-earthly metal abounded, in fact the column is much closer to the antikythera mechanism. It is a simple example of the exquisite craft and knowledge of ancient peoples.

Ninety eight percent pure wrought iron, the column is a absolute testament to the high level of skill achieved by ancient Indian ironsmiths. It would have had to been made using a coal heated furnace to even create a heat hot enough to achieve forge welding, where two or more pieces of metal were hammered together.

However, it has avoided corrosion from the rains, winds and temperature fluctuations over the last 1600 years, not through a conscience effort or magical metallurgy technique on the parts of the pillar’s creators, but through the accidental formation of a “passive protective film.”

This film was created by accident through a complicated combination of the lack of lime in the furnaces used to make the iron pillar, the presence of raw slag and unreduced iron in the pillar, and the wetting and drying cycles of the weather. All of which helped to create a 1/20th of a millimeter thick layer of “misawite,”on the pillar. Misawite is a compound of iron, oxygen and hydrogen which does not rust.

It seems rather than chalk up the pillar to ancient astronauts, or alien metallurgy, it is enough to recognize the skill involved in creating a six ton iron, 22 foot high iron pillar, some 1600 years ago.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia | Natural Wonders

3,800 square-miles of salt flat spread out across Bolivia’s remote southwest. Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, an endless sheet of hexagonal tiles (created by the crystalline nature of the salt), dotted with pyramids of salt. Despite the desert dryness, freezing night temperatures, and fierce desert sun, this landscape is not devoid of life. Pink flamingos, ancient cacti, and rare hummingbirds all live in the Salar de Uyuni.

During the wet season, the salt desert is transformed into a enormous salt lake, albeit one that is only six to twenty inches deep, traversable by both boat and truck. During this time, the shallow salt lake perfectly mirrors the sky, creating bizarre illusions of infinity. In the middle of this seemingly infinite salty lake is a hotel built entirely out of—naturally—salt.

Created from salt bricks held together with salt mortar, the hotel and everything inside it, including the chairs and tables, is made from salt. While the Hotel Playa Blanca has no electricity and little in the way of amenities, and its water must be trucked in, it does offer even more important and certainly rarer qualities: utter silence, an all-encompassing austere beauty, and an astonishing view of the night sky.

Also worth traveling to are the nearby Laguna Colorado and Laguna Verde. Laguna Colorado is a red-hued lake filled with thousands of pink flamingos, while Laguna Verde is a blue-green salt lake found at the foot of the volcano Licancabur. Its shifting aqua color is caused by copper sediments and microorganisms living within the lake.

Ordino, Andorra | Unique Collections

It is only fitting that Ukrainian Nicolaï Siadristy’s micro miniature museum should be in the little town of Ordino, in the pint-sized country of Andorra.

Widely considered the world’s best microminiaturist, Nicolaï Siadristy has a lifetime’s worth of tiny creations on display in this museum. What does a microminiturist create? A tray complete with a wine bottle and glasses all set on a grain of salt, or the human being at various stages of life, represented on a gold thread 400 times thinner than a human hair.

Each work in the museum is a masterpiece that took around half a year to create, and each must be viewed through a microscope. The favorite among all viewers is the caravan of camels trudging toward a pyramid and palm tree, all nestled within the eye of a needle.