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Home Odd Places
Real corners of the Earth that look made up.
Odd Places visits real places that look as if they cannot be: a lake the colour of bubble gum, a salt flat that turns into the world's biggest mirror, more than a thousand hills that turn chocolate brown. Every place here exists, and you could, in principle, go and see it.
Each piece explains why the place looks the way it does — the geology, chemistry or biology behind it — and gives the facts a visitor would want: where it is, how big it is, and when it is at its strangest. Everything is checked: articles are written with the help of AI, verified against at least two independent sources, at least one of them a scientific study, a university or an official body such as a geological survey, a national park authority or UNESCO, and those sources are listed at the end. Figures from travel websites are not trusted on their own.
Unlike a gallery of pretty photographs, these pieces answer the question every photograph raises: how did this happen?
Three good first reads, picked by the editor.
Fact-based Odd Places
On the shore of Chile's biggest lake, the water has hollowed solid marble into chapels, tunnels and pillars with smooth swirling walls, and it has done it in only a few thousand years.
Fact-based Odd Places
On the island of Bohol, well over a thousand round grassy hills rise from the fields like sweets on a tray, green for much of the year and brown as cocoa when the dry season comes.
Fact-based Odd Places
On a small island off Western Australia sits a lake so pink it looks painted, and a glass of its water stays pink too, thanks to some very salty tiny residents.
Fact-based Odd Places
Grand Prismatic Spring is deep blue in the middle and ringed with green, yellow and orange, and the two halves of that rainbow are made in completely different ways.
Fact-based Odd Places
In western Madagascar, limestone stands in thousands of needles up to 100 metres tall, and much of the carving was done from underneath, by caves that later lost their roofs.
Fact-based Odd Places
On Brazil's north coast the rain turns a huge field of white sand into a patchwork of freshwater pools every year, and by December most of them have vanished again.
Fact-based Odd Places
On a shore in Northern Ireland, thousands of neat six-sided stone columns step down into the sea, and the real builder was a lake of lava that cooled very, very slowly.
Fact-based Odd Places
From space, a bull's-eye about 40 kilometres wide stares up out of the desert in Mauritania, and the way it formed is slower and stranger than any falling rock from the sky.
Fact-based Odd Places
On a quiet stretch of the Otago coast, dozens of almost perfectly round boulders sit on the sand like marbles left by giants, and each one took millions of years to grow.
Fact-based Odd Places
In the far north-west of China, a range of hills is banded red, orange, yellow and green, as if someone had painted it with a very large brush, and the paint turns out to be rock.
Fact-based Odd Places
Hot springs at Pamukkale have spent thousands of years laying a thin white skin of stone down a 200-metre cliff, building a staircase of shallow pools the colour of the sky.
Fact-based Odd Places
The Salar de Uyuni is so flat that a thin film of rain turns it into a mirror 129 kilometres across, and when it dries, satellites use it to check their eyesight.