Welcome To The World’s Most Fascinating Website

The top headlines read like an English class assignment to come up with the most wildly unexpected and improbable news articles possible—dare I say even Onion-esque. With titles like:

The Chinese Bagel That Helped to Win a War

A Giant Sloth Tooth in a 200-Foot-Deep Sinkhole

How to Get Your Laundry Done in Ancient Mesopotamia

Austin Just Sent Its Favorite Queso Recipe to the Moon

These, and many more like them, live on a website called **Atlas Obscura. **The site, which calls itself, among other things, “a comprehensive database of the world’s most wondrous places and foods” also showcases some of the most peculiar stories from around the globe (see above)—highlighting subjects many of us seldom contemplate or think about for the plain reason that they’re wildly obscure and non-obvious.

Their mission definitely resonates with me and this should come as no surprise to those of you who’ve been reading my daily posts for a while. I have a strong affinity for wonder and curiosity and any mediums by which one can exercise either of those.

But I digress. Back to the site. My favorite part of Atlas Obscura isn’t its fantastically obscure stories, or even it’s delightfully designed, almost boy-scout-survival-guide feel, it’s a section called “The Atlas.”

A simple navigation from the homepage to the “Places” tab at the top of the screen and you find yourself face-to-face with a map of the world dotted with hundreds of forest green location markers of varying size and shape—some of which have numbers inside them, others which don’t.

Now, say you’ve skipped the introductory paragraph above The Atlas which explains what all of this represents. You might decide to “fly home” so to speak, and navigate towards a familiar location on the map.

For example’s sake, let’s pick New York City.

(Using every bone in my body to not imitate the “Enhance…enhance…” GIF from Super Troopers…ahh, to hell with it.)

As you quickly start to realize, your desired location—especially if you live in a popular urban area—is densely packed with flagged points on the map. But unlike your Google Map searches for nearby coffee shops or great cocktail bars, these icons represent much more, well obscure, locations.

The beauty of what Atlas Obscura has built with “The Atlas” is a crowdsourced map of the world’s most interesting places. Each and every one of these map flags corresponds to a very unique type of landmark.

Here’s how they describe it:

Atlas Obscura catalogues the most unusual, surprising, and amazing places around the world, thanks to the discoveries shared by our intrepid community of travelers and explorers. There are now more than 15,700 incredible hidden wonders listed in the Atlas, and we’ve plotted each and every one of them on this interactive map. The possibilities are vast, from the Icelandic witchcraft museum to the tree goats of Morocco, to Galileo’s middle finger, to the Skeleton Lake of India and thousands of other architectural oddities, natural wonders, catacombs and crypts, and unique collections across the world’s continents and oceans. It truly is a “definitive map of the world’s extraordinary sights.”

One of my favorite ways to explore a place that I thought I knew well is to come to The Atlas and use it to rediscover the world around me from a completely new perspective.

Just through this approach, I recently discovered that the city’s oldest tree is located just around the corner from my apartment. Or that there’s an abandoned subway station on 18th street.

You can submit your very own obscure locations to the map via this link.

They also have a number of other really interesting sections of the site, including one called Gastro Obscura covering food stories from around the world.

I hope you enjoy the site and happy exploring!