TWO: DONANA
My next stop was a short jaunt up through Spain, along the southwestern coast: Donana National Park. Plato wrote that Atlantis was located near Gades, the ancient name for the city of Cadiz, about 100km northwest of Gibraltar. Just to the north sits the national park, a former royal hunting ground where the Guadalquivir River splits to form a delta along the Atlantic coast.
That marshy delta, with its winding, twisting landmasses and estuaries, turns out to be another possible candidate for the lost city: A German researcher caused a stir a decade ago when he published an article in the archaeological journal
Antiquity, claiming that satellite photos seemed to show evidence that a city with structures similar to those in Plato’s Atlantis had once occupied that very spot.
Today, Donana is a peaceful nature reserve beloved by bird-watchers, but as José María Galán, a park ecologist, pointed out as we drove through the choppy surf, it has a violent history. The offshore AzoresGibraltar Transform Fault shifts roughly every 350 to 450 years, unleashing huge earthquakes and tsunamis that obliterate anything built along the coast. (The last such quake, in 1755, levelled Lisbon.)
Mr Galán, who was wearing a Yellowstone Park cap he’d picked up on a recent trip, compared the regularity of seismological disasters there to the clockwork spurts of the Old Faithful geyser. It’s geologically impossible for a city to sink to the bottom of the ocean, but an ancient cataclysm might account for Plato’s famous description of an island vanishing in “a single day and night of misfortune”.
Donana’s wetlands flood for six months annually, which is great for birds migrating to and from Africa and not so great for amateur Atlantis seekers. But the graceful, sloping dunes that overlook the water have clearly been occupied by multiple civilisations over the years; their small, identical mounds of sand have revealed pottery shards and other artefacts dating back thousands of years.
Every year during the winter rainy season, the Guadalquivir River soaks Donana’s plain and leaves behind a new layer of sediment. If Atlantis really had been located in Donana, it might now be buried under 20 feet of silt and clay. As Mr Galán knelt down to show me a Morse code line of scorpion tracks, a gust of ocean wind blew up and the trail vanished in a cloud of sand. “See, in the end nature erases everything,” he said.