Penang is well-known for its vibrant Straits Chinese Peranakan culture, but if you know where to look, there’s another chapter to its history. While the focus is often on the marriage between overseas Chinese traders marrying local Malay women, the truth is, the Chinese were not the only traders conducting business in George Town. Merchants from around...

The Sol building was designed by Juan Ripollés and opened in June 2008. The building is located in the Grao, the maritime neighborhood of the city.  The sculpture, which covers the building like a skin, is made of cut Murano glass fired at 1,300 degrees and is considered the largest Spanish sculpture attached to an apartment block. It is 124 feet...

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we learn about the Ludlow colony in southern Colorado—a place that was once a bustling tent city and haven for miners and their families. But it was also the site of one of the country’s most monumental and...

This story was originally published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons license. Some people fear that breaking a mirror can lead to seven years of misfortune. The history of this superstition may go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who ascribed mysterious powers to reflected images. As a scholar of the Indigenous...

This themed crossword comes from Zhouqin (C.C.) Burnikel, who grew up in Xi’an, China, before moving to the United States in 2001. She's the author of Sip & Solve Easy Mini Crosswords. 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....

“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers—except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic:...