"Drought Has Revealed Spain’s Long-Submerged ‘Stonehenge’ "

[Photo: RUBEN ORTEGA MARTIN/ RAICES DE PERALEDA]

When I passed through this region only a few summers ago, from a train I wrote in 'Slow Travels in Unsung Spain'... 

"swerving around a hill, a vast body of water suddenly appeared – a statement of abundance and life in this hard land, like something biblical from a Leonard Cohen song.

This was the Embalse de Valdecañas [reservoir] that marks the start of Extremadura province, being connected to the more than 1,000-kilometre-long Tajo (or Tagus) river that sweeps into Portugal: a river that two millennia ago the Roman poet Ovid sang the praises of for its gold-bearing sands."

Now, as ALYSSA MCMURTRY found, this scene is the exact opposite:


"THIS SUMMER HAS BEEN UNUSUALLY scorching across Europe and beyond, and things have only grown more intense in the already hot and dry region of Extremadura in Spain. 

Months into an official drought that could be developing into a mega-drought, local farmers are facing the loss of hundreds of millions of euros. Many think this is just a sign of things to come.

Droughts, and the way that they strip the land of plant cover and drain lakes and reservoirs, for all the problems they cause, are often a boon for archaeologists. 

The water level of the Valdecañas Reservoir in the province of Cáceres has dropped so low that it is providing an extraordinary glimpse into the past.

“All my life, people had told me about the dolmen,” says Angel Castaño, a resident of Peraleda de la Mata, a village just a couple miles from the reservoir, and president of the local cultural association. 

“I had seen parts of it peeking out from the water before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in full. It’s spectacular because you can appreciate the entire complex for the first time in decades.”

The dolmen he’s talking about is known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the remains of a 7,000-year old megalithic monument consisting of around 100 standing stones—some up to six feet tall—arranged around an oval open space. It takes hours of hiking to get to the dolmen, which is now a few dozen yards away from the edge of the tranquil blue water. 

Visitors today are more likely to see deer than guards. Traces of aquatic plant life in the sand show that the site is dry and accessible only temporarily."

Read more from ALYSSA MCMURTRY's  wonderful article for Altas Obscura here  and my new book here.

In France: "Literary Vending Machines Serve Up Short Stories"

IN GRENOBLE, FRANCE, the short story addict doesn’t have to go far to get their fix. 

Across the seven square miles of the central city, 14 orange-and-black machines* are dotted like Easter eggs in train stations, municipal buildings, and even the local museum. 

At the push of a button, each one will unspool a little piece of literature, printed on a long strip of paper, like a grocery store receipt. 

You can select for length—one, three, or five minutes—but precisely what you’ll be served up is in the hands of the gods. These are story dispensers, built by Grenoble-based publishing company Short Edition.

When the company began producing the machines in 2015, they were hardly set on global domination. But today, they are found around the world, with some 30 dispensers across the United States alone. (A map of the machines can be seen here.) 

In restaurants and hotels, libraries and government buildings, loiterers and literati alike can help themselves to these free stories, pulled from a digital bank of more than 100,000 original submissions.

The stories come from writing contests, with each entry carefully evaluated by Short Edition’s judges. At some point, they hope to translate them, and to “have some Asian authors read in Europe or America, American authors read in Africa or South America, etc.,” Loïc Giraut, an international business developer for the company, told LitHub. 

“We want to create a platform for independent artists, like the Sundance Institute,” Kristan Leroy, export director at Short Edition, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The idea is to make people happy. There is too much doom and gloom today.”

(* Dispensers cost $9,200, with an additional $190 monthly fee for content and software. COURTESY SHORT EDITION)

Read at source, Atlas Obscura.