How to Find Atlantis

by Brian Dunning
March 18, 2025

Today we are going to learn how to find Atlantis. Even if you're aware that the idea of Atlantis was never intended as anything more than a philosophical thought experiment, not everyone is so well read. The majority of Americans — some 57% according to a recent poll — believe that Atlantis was a real prehistoric civilization. With most people thinking it was real, it should come as no surprise that quite a lot of people are reasonably serious about finding out where it was. And so today, I present ten of the top possibilities. You'll find plenty of other claimed locations of Atlantis besides what I list here; my list is a bit different in that I tried to limit it to places where you can actually go and see the claimed evidence for yourself.

In his works Timaeus and Critias, Plato had his character Socrates — based on his real-life mentor Socrates — challenge the other characters to imagine a perfect, ideal society, for which he used an idealized version of their home town of Athens, contending with an imaginary opposing power — which he named Atlantis — some 8,500 years before Athens existed; a foe which was larger than Asia and Libya combined, and which represented the very antithesis of all that Plato deemed ideal. From this, it's obviously quite a stretch to get the impression he was referring to an actual place that really existed.

Nevertheless, a subculture of people believe that if it was in print, it was therefore automatically non-fiction; and therefore Atlantis could only have been a real place. And so they search for it — presumably for what Indiana Jones termed fortune and glory. But belief is when dogma prevails over knowledge; and so here are the top ten places they search, that you can personally visit and inspect for yourself:

1. Doñana National Park, Spain

This UNESCO World Heritage Site in Spain is known for its unusually high biodiversity. It is a vast plain of marshlands and low sand dunes along Spain's southern coast, west of Gibraltar. Nearly half a million people visit each year. It is believed that Phoenicians and other ancient peoples may have spent time there, but no archaeological evidence remains. Why? Because it's marshlands and sand, and gets completely wiped out and replaced quite regularly, along the geological time scale. It has also been completely washed away and gone, then built back up, more times than anyone can know.

And yet, as recently as the early 2000s, this beautiful national park has joined the list of Atlantis candidates. Why? For no reason other than Science By Press Release. A team which included zero people with any relevant expertise looked at "satellite imagery" — read that as Google Earth — and felt they saw vaguely circular structures in the sand and mud. The press releases went out, and that's how public understanding of science got to the point it is today.

2. Santorini, Greece

If you're a believer that Atlantis was real, the island of Santorini in the Aegean should be at the top of your list. A beautiful vacation destination today, the island is the rim of a mostly submerged caldera which exploded in 1600 BCE. The bronze-age city at Akrotiri partially survived, though archaeologists found no human remains, suggesting the people had sufficient warning to mostly escape. Some believe the event may have inspired Plato's Atlantis — though it's not a very good match. Plato said Atlantis was destroyed in a single day and night of earthquakes and floods — strange that he would omit the apocalyptic explosion of the entire island.

3. Bimini Road, Bahamas

In the 1930s, Edgar Cayce — one of America's first celebrity psychics — claimed that he had received messages from someone who had lived in Atlantis in a previous life. They told him that the island of Bimini was the peak of an ancient mountain on the continent of Atlantis — though this is a hard case to make if you look at the underwater bathymetry of the area. Nevertheless, ever since then, believers in Cayce and in Atlantis alike have kept their eyes open for evidence there.

There are conflicting stories over who found the Bimini Road first; possibly a pilot flying around the island looking for it, possibly a group of divers doing the same thing. About 14 meters underwater, and about 600 meters offshore, there are big blocks of limestone poking up through the sandy bottom. They're big and bulbous, and some of them appear to be lined up (unsurprising to geologists, because that's how rocks fracture). If it ever was a road, it was a terrible, terrible one.

Locals can plainly see that it's little different from the underwater rocks all around all the islands; but to true believers, it uniquely betrays the hand of man.

(And, not to forget: the second annual Skeptoid Adventure in July 2025 is taking a huge group of you right there [though a boat ride out to the Road is an optional extra]. There are still tickets available, so if this sounds like it even might be fun — and trust me, it will be — come to Skeptoid.com/events to check it out and reserve your spot.)

4. Antarctica

In 1513, the Turkish naval cartographer Piri Reis compiled a map from about 20 others in an effort to depict the whole world. One of its many inevitable gross inaccuracies is that it depicts Antarctica as ice-free, since no one had yet been there or knew that it was covered in ice. Based on this alone, pseudohistory authors such as Charles Berlitz and Erich von Däniken began promoting Antarctica as the actual site of Atlantis as a given fact.

Compounding this was a pseudo-geophysical conjecture named "Earth Crustal Displacement" which attempts to explain how Atlantis could have zoomed all the way from the Mediterranean to the South Pole in just 12,000 years. Pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock embraces this conjecture, and today still argues for an expedition to Antarctica to find Atlantis.

5. Malta

Some say that the island of Malta was Atlantis, based on little more than it has ancient stone temples dating back more than 5,500 years. They are said to be the second oldest structures in the world, second only to Turkey's Göbekli Tepe. But Atlantis was supposedly 7,500 years older than that. So the ruins on Malta would be from a much later civilization, those don't constitute evidence that there was also a far older one.

Sea levels at the alleged time of Atlantis, say 12,000 years ago, were some 60 or 70 meters lower than today. The several islands that make up Malta were all joined into one, but overall it was only about one and a half times its current size of 316 km², so let's be generous and say it was 500 km². But Plato said that just the central plane of Atlantis alone measured 2,000 by 3,000 stadia, which is just about 150,000 km² — that's bigger than Germany; and also 300 times bigger than Malta was at its biggest.

Moreover, we can pretty easily tell that Malta was never destroyed in a single day and night of earthquakes and floods, and it hasn't sunken under the sea.

6. Spartel Bank, Strait of Gibraltar

The Spartel Bank is a submerged island outside the Strait of Gibraltar, which was covered up just about 12,000 years ago as sea levels rose. Today it's about 56m underwater (and I know I said these were all places you could go to, but yes you will need special diving equipment to see this one).

Spartel had been slipping under the rising waters since the last glacial maximum. At its largest when ocean levels were lowest, it was about 113 km². By 20,000 years ago, it was down to 26 km². By 12,000 years ago, it was down to less than 1 km², and then it was gone.

But Plato said Atlantis was 150,000 km², with a military consisting of about 1 million men, and a navy of 1,200 ships. It would have been quite a trick to squeeze all that onto an island half the size of New York's Central Park.

7. The Island of Pharos, Egypt

Pharos was a tiny island just off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt, and was the site of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. It was connected to the mainland when a 1,200-meter causeway was built, named the Heptastadion, meaning seven stadia, the causeway's length.

In 1913, remains of an ancient harbor were discovered in the shallow waters off of Pharos, and so some concluded the island used to be bigger. However, at the time of Atlantis, Pharos was not only not an island, it was well inland in Egypt.

Today the Pharos and the Heptastadion are both lost under centuries of fill and new construction. But you can still visit the site of the lighthouse.

8. Richat Structure, Mauritania

Way out in the middle of the desert in Mauritania is the Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara), a 30 km wide structure of concentric rings of rock and sand. They're low-lying; if you were on the ground you probably wouldn't notice a thing. But from the air, it's startling.

It was created by the uplift of sedimentary and volcanic rock layers due to a subsurface igneous intrusion, and shaped into concentric rings by millions of years of erosion. Plato described Atlantis as being designed as concentric rings, alternating between water and land; so some Ancient Atlantis theorists insist this had to be the place. Never mind that this part of Africa was last underwater some 61 million years ago — give or take a few. But if you want to fly over an Atlantis candidate, this is the one to put on your bucket list.

9. The Americas

When Christopher Columbus returned to Europe after his first voyage to the Americas, a surprising number of people figured that he had actually landed on Atlantis. Even in those days, it was not unusual for people to assume that Atlantis had been an actual place. Honestly, how many people have actually read Plato's dialogs, or even scholarly analysis of them? Almost none. So whatever the average person knows about Atlantis is probably that it was a real place; because that's the only thing they've ever heard. It was the same in the late 15th century.

They knew that Columbus had sailed across the Atlantic, toward what Plato said was "opposite the pillars of Hercules" (the Strait of Gibraltar). Amerigo Vespucci's recognition of the Americas as a "New World" distinct from Asia resonated with peoples' idea of a "lost continent". And since the full extent of the Americas was yet unknown, it left room for speculation about mythical lands.

10. Southwest Morocco

One Atlantis theorist in particular, Michael Hübner, believes the Souss-Massa plain on the coast of Morocco is where Atlantis was. This is a geologist's paradise, located between two small mountain ranges, with beautiful rock formations everywhere you look. Hübner's evidence is mainly that there is a caldera-like structure in the northwest that he believes is exactly the dimensions Plato gave for the central island of Atlantis — despite the fact that Plato gave no such dimensions; he only did for the whole nation of concentric rings, which is the 150,000 km² number.

Hübner's other piece of evidence is a series of caves on the shore, cut by wave action in a layer of softer rock overlain by harder rock (and which are also pretty cool). He believes these to be "docks" that the Atlanteans must have used. Overall, Hübner's conjecture is nothing but pure pareidolia — the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli.

In conclusion...

I've often noted that when a claim is backed by no good evidence, but instead with a mountain of really bad evidence; that's a pretty good indication that no good evidence exists. We have a thousand blurry photos of Bigfoot but not a single good one. Why? Bigfoot doesn't photograph so well, because he's a guy in a $20 gorilla suit.

And these ten conjectures were only among those where I felt you could reasonably go there for yourself to see. One of the very most popular claims for Atlantis is off the coast of the island of Cyprus, where images were collected by sonar of blobs that some people have interpreted as man-made structures — 1,500 meters underwater. I didn't include that because no one can go that deep. But anyone can also see that even at the height of the last glacial maximum, that spot was still under more than a kilometer of water. I give you my personal guarantee that it was not Atlantis.

Atlantis hunting is not an evidence-driven mission. It is a passion project. It is practiced by people who have already heard and understood and rejected the fact that Atlantis was conceived purely as fiction for a philosophical thought experiment. They are those who are driven purely by wonder and hope and imagination, and the belief that the buried treasure lies just one more thrust of the shovel away.

I do not hold with them in the false hope that they will find Atlantis, but I still very much sympathize. Each of us has some yearning in life, perhaps even an impossible one; but that yearning is a spark that is the difference between life and stagnation. I have my spark and I know what it is, and I will always strive toward it; and that's what makes my life meaningful (to me) and not just a footnote about a random hunk of temporary meat whirling through space. We all have some spark. My question to you is: What is yours?

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning