Cartography of the amazing
From valuable art collections exhibited in galleries, museums or centers that go out of the conventional circuits to natural wonders, passing through architectural curiosities or forgotten places of history make up this compendium of tourist attractions created by the community of travelers and explorers of ** Atlas Obscura **, a multi-platform medium active since 2009.
They define it as “the ultimate map of extraordinary attractions” and currently includes 14,365 . We say at the moment because it is about a project in constant evolution.
“We get a lot of recommendations. About 800 a month. Finally, we usually include about 200 on the map because we have to check everything , get photographs and make sure that the recommendation is really a hidden wonder”, he explains to Traveler.es David Plotz, CEO of Atlas Obscura.
Tashirojima, the island of cats where even Garfield would like to live
Moving around this interactive map is completely intuitive. All you have to do is drag your mouse across the screen and click on the green marks that dot the different places in the world. From there, location information and a brief description of the wonder appear which leads us to another web page where all this data is expanded.
Of all these places and curiosities, the ones that cause the most success among its travelers are Hell's doors , a huge burning hole in the desert of Turkmenistan; the creepy skeleton lake Roopkund, in India; and the lovely cat island in Tashirojima, Japan.
If we focus on Spain, **the Atlas Obscura community opts for the Mercury Fountain**, a sculpture that can be seen at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona; and by the lathe of the orphans from number 17 Ramelleres street , in Raval, where babies were once abandoned in the Casa de la Misericordia.
“We believe that wherever you are in the world, there is always something amazing around every corner and we want you to explore it. We believe that we can all be explorers of the world around us”, describes Plotz about the philosophy of Atlas Obscura.
And it is that, as he assures, "a follower of Atlas Obscura looks for hidden wonders, the kind of places that are off the beaten track , but they are magical, wonderful and, sometimes, strange”.