Author: Ms. R.

On one of the busiest stretches of the Milano-Laghi motorway, a silver volcano reaches 30 meters into the sky. At night, it lights up bright red. This distinctive building is a more recent addition to a roadside service station that has been standing on this highway since the 1950s. The service area originally opened in 1958 as a parking lot on the Autostrada dei Laghi, the current A8 and A9, direction from Milan to Como for the roadside restaurant on……

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There are about 800,000 sperm whales in the world, but the 250 or so that live off the Caribbean coast of Dominica are unique. They have their own dialect and social structures, and, while most sperm whales migrate, whales in Dominica tend to stay put, hanging out near the shores of the island nation year-round. “There’s no real good explanation based on ecology or movement,” says biologist Shane Gero, who has studied the Dominican population for nearly 20 years……

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Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit a restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill that pushes diners to eat beyond their borders through its embrace of global street foods. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear……

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Atlas Obscura‘s weekly crossword comes to us from creator Laura Braunstein and editor Stella Zawistowski, members of Inkubator, which publishes crossword puzzles by women and nonbinary constructors. You can see more puzzles in their book, Inkubator Crosswords: 100 Audacious Puzzles from Women and Nonbinary Creators. You can solve the puzzle below, or download it in .pdf or .puz. Note that the links in the clues will take you to Atlas Obscura pages that may contain the answer. Happy solving!…

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What if suddenly there were five cardinal directions, Snow White had the company of eight dwarves, or there were thirteen months in the year? What if a number that seemed eternally fixed became augmented by a quality or quantity that had been hiding in plain sight all along? Sweet, bitter, salty, sour—and umami Something like that happened in the culinary sciences not too long ago. For most of history, humans knew and named no more than four taste qualities:……

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Jim Bridger was a well-known 19th-century trader, scout, explorer, and promoter who established many trails based on his knowledge of Native American routes. He and a partner built a wooden stockade trading post here in 1842. By this time the “mountain man” era was passing swiftly, and the post traded not just with Native Americans but with the emigrant trains that were starting to stream westward. Here the westward-bound Emigrant Trail split into the Mormon Trail (and later the……

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Kawa Kawa Hill takes its name from the local language for the word “cauldron.” It is a hill that resembles a crater located not far from the foothills of the famous Mount Mayon. A climb up the top of the hill will lead you to a view of the depression in the center and views over Ligao and the surrounding areas. Apart from its natural beauty, it is also famous for its unique life-sized depictions of the Stations of……

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