Author: Ms. R.

A few years ago, Abdullah Gohar’s mother introduced him to a ghost. That’s how she phrased it, and at first, Gohar was confused. “What are you talking about?” he recalls asking her. But he was also intrigued: She wasn’t alluding to seances and ectoplasm, but rather prehistoric bones, toes from an ancient elephant that had trundled through their neighborhood millions of years before. Gohar grew up near Egypt’s Fayum Depression, a basin southwest of Cairo that’s studded with the……

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This article is adapted from the September 18, 2021, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. Coffee is everywhere. It’s in espressos and cappuccinos; it’s in pods and packets of Nescafé. It’s in small-town gas stations and big-city cafés. It’s on every continent. Some 90 percent of people on Earth start the day with caffeine, usually tea or coffee. All that coffee can be traced back to one place: patches of forest in Ethiopia…….

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When he first entered the Lazzaretto Nuovo, on the island of the same name just north of Venice, Gerolamo Fazzini made his way through the overgrowth, which over the years had invaded the entire structure. He entered through a hole to find sunlight streaming in through the cracks made by poplars that had fallen into the walls. “I turned my gaze toward a wall and I noticed patches of color here and there behind the lime,” he says. “It……

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Located just off the Somaliland coast in and around the port of Berbera, lie hulking shipwrecks and rusting, half-sunken ships. These wrecks are both gathered in clusters near the port, where the harbor is too shallow for the wrecks to sink fully, and can also be found further out into the Gulf of Aden. Berbera is the capital of the Sahil region of Somaliland, an unrecognized sovereign state in the Horn of Africa. In ancient times, Berbera was one city……

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Clitheroe Castle in Lancashire, England, is all that remains of a former motte and bailey type castle. It was known as an enclosure castle, which meant the outer wall formed the most important part of its defenses. Unfortunately, most of the original curtain wall has been lost. The castle keep, the second smallest stone keep in England, is in very good condition for a 12th-century structure, but there was extensive restoration work in 1848. Most English motte and bailey……

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In 1943, local farmers started hearing underground thunders and noticed steam filtering from the Earth in the town of Paricutín. In February, Dionisio Pulido escaped from his cropland as smoke arose from fissures caused by the eruption.  By dusk, flames rose like fireworks into the air. Volcanic eruptions continued for nine more years at what became one of the Earth’s youngest volcanoes. Climbing the volcanic cone is a fun adventure best done early in the morning. No special equipment……

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Amongst a network of strip malls, highways, and fast food joints just outside Chicago, you will find the Wolf Road Prairie. Back in the 1920s, half of the 80-acre lot at the intersection of Wolf Road and 31st Street in Westchester, Illinois had been slated for housing development. The prairie had been divided into nearly 600 lots for housing and commercial development. Lots were sold and developers went so far as to lay down concrete sidewalks in the southern end……

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Stuck high up on a wall verging on a busy road in the village of Rottingdean, this piece of local folklore located on the former home of Rudyard Kipling is so hard to find even most locals might not know its there. To some, it looks like a dog, to others a human face, or even a gargoyle.  Nobody knows exactly what it is supposed to be, but this curious stone is the center of an odd local custom. Local custom……

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