Top 5 places in the world to search for Atlantis
Atlantis-obsessive Mark Adams lists 5 possible locations for the mythical city…
1. Santorini, Greece
This Aegean island, justifiably famous for its natural beauty, is the only hypothetical site for Atlantis that is considered as a possibility by mainstream academics.
Its red, white and black sand beaches correspond to the tricolor stone that the philosopher Plato describes in the original story of Atlantis, and its extraordinary ring-shaped caldera – formed by a severe natural disaster, similar to the event that erased Plato’s island – is geological evidence of an event that might have inspired the tale of a mighty civilization “destroyed by earthquakes and floods”.
The 1967 discovery of the ancient port city of Akrotiri, buried under several meters of ash for 3600 years, revealed frescoes that seemed to echo details in the original Atlantis story.
2. Malta
In Plato’s tale, Atlantis is an enigmatic island civilisation dotted with extraordinary temples. Malta, in addition to being perhaps the world’s most mysterious island (a reputation boosted by its affiliation with the once-secretive Knights of St John), is home to the oldest free-standing stone structures in the Mediterranean.
Maltese temples such as Hagar Qim and Mnajdra were erected several centuries before the first stone was raised at the Great Pyramid at Giza. Also like Atlantis, Malta’s population seems to have been wiped out at least once in antiquity by a watery cataclysm.
3. The Azores
This Atlantic archipelago played a key role in the most influential Atlantis theory of all time. In 1882, the former U.S. congressman Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the book that launched the modern search for Plato’s lost city.
Donnelly’s thesis, still the most popular (though widely ridiculed following the discovery of plate tectonics), was that Atlantis had been a continent in the mid-Atlantic – the circular path of the Gulf Stream supposedly still traced its rough outline – that suddenly dropped to the ocean bottom. All that remained of the mighty empire was the tips of its towering mountains, now known as the Azores.
