What is Atlas Obscura?
In an age where everything seems to have been explored and there is nothing new to be found, we celebrate a different way of looking at the world. If you're searching for miniature cities, glass flowers, underwater restaurants, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or 22-million-year-old cheese caves, Atlas Obscura is where to find them.Atlas Obscura is an award-winning media and travel company. Widely celebrated for building the definitive, community-driven platform for discovering the world's hidden wonders, we also offer top-of-class storytelling, unique online and in-person experiences, and once-in-a-lifetime trips.
Our community-driven platform is the Atlas itself, a collection of more than 20,000 wondrous places around the world. It is a collaborative project. We depend on our community of explorers to help us discover amazing places and share them with the world. If you know of a curious place that's not already in Atlas Obscura, we want to hear about it!
Atlas ObscuraOur Mission
At Atlas Obscura, our mission is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the incredible world we all share.
- 25,500 Unique Places & Foods Collected
- 12,901 StoriesTold
- 1,163 Experiences Held Around the World
- 1,000+ Travelers On Our Trips
We share discoveries
We are a global community of explorers, who have together created a comprehensive database of the world’s most wondrous places and foods —25,500 of them contributed by our community so far, and more every day, from a secret apartment atop the Eiffel Tower to bridges built out of living roots, from a temple shaped like a chicken to an island ruled by cats, from a fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding to a spicy chutney made out of red ants.We report extraordinary stories
We are a publisher of best-in-class journalism about hidden places, incredible history, scientific marvels, and gastronomical wonders. Our first book, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, was a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon and in the New York Times.We host local experiences
We hold extraordinary events all over the country, every week. In nine U.S. cities, Atlas Obscura Societies create intimate, wondrous experiences for our community. From back-room tours to workshops with the world’s most remarkable people, we give our community access to the rarest experiences.We lead amazing trips
We lead the world’s most unusual trips to the world’s most remarkable places. Atlas Obscura takes small groups of travelers on adventures, from Bhutan’s mountaintop temples to the ruins of Meroe in Sudan, and into the kitchens of renowned local chefs from Mexico to Italy.
Thanks Atlas Obscura!
