Case file · Anomaly hotspot
Spartel Bank as Atlantis
In 2001 the French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard proposed that Spartel Bank, a former island in the Strait of Gibraltar drowned about 12,000 years ago, was the origin of Plato's Atlantis.
2001 CE · 35.92, -5.92 · status: disputed
The account
The bank, now 56 m below the surface, lies just outside the 'Pillars of Heracles' where Plato placed Atlantis. The geophysicist Marc-André Gutscher, who also studied the bank, later wrote that it could not have been Atlantis, since Plato described a Bronze Age state that a small Stone Age island could not support. A review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review criticised the use of dates and coincidences.
The sceptical view
The island was real; the identification with Plato's moral tale is not supported.
Connections in the atlas
- Donnelly's Atlantis on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge
- The Azores 'pyramid'
- Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules