It's time to get off the beaten path. Inspiring equal parts wonder and wanderlust, Atlas Obscura celebrates over 700 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.
Talk about a bucket list: here are natural wonders—the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, or a baobob tree in South Africa that's so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants. Not to mention the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia, Turkmenistan's 40-year hole of fire called the Gates of Hell, a graveyard for decommissioned ships on the coast of Bangladesh, eccentric bone museums in Italy, or a weather-forecasting invention that was powered by leeches, still on display in Devon, England.
Created by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton, ATLAS OBSCURA revels in the weird, the unexpected, the overlooked, the hidden and the mysterious. Every page expands our sense of how strange and marvelous the world really is. And with its compelling descriptions, hundreds of photographs, surprising charts, maps for every region of the world, it is a book to enter anywhere, and will be as appealing to the armchair traveler as the die-hard adventurer.
Anyone can be a tourist. ATLAS OBSCURA is for the explorer.
A gift book that celebrates the world's most wondrous and unusual places, people, and things -- from macabre museums to magical natural phenomena -- in all corners of the globe. Where 1,000 PLACES redefined the "travel book" with its bucket-list approach, ATLAS OBSCURA is a totally new category-killer -- one that captures the wanderlust and sense of wonder that inspires passioante travel. The weird, the wonderful, the slightly creepy, the outrageously untamed - every entry, continent by continent, absolutely real and possible for an intrepid traveler to visit. Each entry includes detailed location information including addresses (for those that have them) and travel instructions (for those that take you off the map).
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