Atlantis and the Silver City (16 page)

As with all civilizations, water was essential to Atlantis. Over millennia, many cultures have waxed and waned depending on its availability. Plato refers to water in twelve of his clues. Those referring to the grand canal simply beggar belief, and many have suggested that they owe more to his vivid imagination than to fact. I had tended to agree, but the canal I was now standing over was forcing a reassessment. I will return to it later.

Canals apart, everything else Plato wrote about the water supply for Atlantis is completely practicable and mirrored in modern-day southwest Iberia.

One of the delights of the area is the number of large rivers. Many of them are dry in summer and only tidal for a few kilometers upstream, as rainfall is then zero. Some have been dammed to create substantial reservoirs. Over millennia, they have carved out large inlets in the coast and, as would be expected, many have sizeable ports at their mouths. Fishing has been one of the major industries for thousands of years.

Plato credits Poseidon with creating a supply of water from underground on the capitol hill (clue 27): “He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the center island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm and one of cold.” Note that Plato hints here that Poseidon had special abilities and technology. It is one of the few times he ever does this.

Today a large percentage of the local water supply comes from underground lakes and aquifers. These underground layers of permeable rock yield water even in the driest years. In the foothills, just below the mountain town of Monchique, the small spa of Caldas de Monchique is built up around a prolific spring of hot water that runs at a constant 32ºC. This
is where Hannibal supposedly watered those elephants. There is now a hospital there, continuing the spa tradition, which dates back to at least Roman times. It sits alongside a bottling plant that markets the mineral water as a major brand in Portugal. Neither of these establishments spoils the atmosphere of the small village of whimsical buildings and delightful shaded walks through a hillside of massive granite boulders with springs and streams on every side.

There are two more hot springs in the area. One of them, Fonte Santa, is on the neighboring Picota mountain.

Natural springs, called
fontes
, also feature on most country roadsides. They are unmistakable, often framed in stone with a seat and a small collection basin where the weary, parched traveler can rest up and refresh. Some have a stronger flow than others, and they often have a queue of people waiting to fill numerous five-liter bottles for domestic use. They can help themselves to as much free mineral water as they want.

Apart from a few areas, it is possible, with the aid of a traditional dowser, to drill and find water, which is what most new villa owners in the countryside have done.

The countryside is dotted with large wells topped with huge wheeled mechanisms called
noras
. They consist of a large upright wheel that was turned by a mule to bring the water to the surface. Their introduction is attributed to the Moors, but there was extensive contact with North Africa long before they invaded.

Local councils all have large wells to tap into the underground supply, providing mains water for domestic and industrial consumption. This bountiful supply from beneath the ground is not sufficient, however, to meet the huge demand for summer irrigation and domestic use and is now supplemented by a supply from reservoirs in the hills.

Back in the 1970s, when the first Algarve tourist packages began to appear in the holiday brochures, each old farm and house had a large, circular water deposit, called a
cisterna
, dug out of the ground. Either level with the ground or slightly raised, the top sloped so that any rainfall drained into the tank below. The more sophisticated systems also collected water from the terraces. These were not small affairs. Many of them were the size of large swimming pools and held between sixty and a hundred
thousand liters. Many country properties still have them, some having been converted into pools by second-home owners.

The reservoirs set back in the mountains make use of the natural valley contours. From some, a system of small concrete canals distributes water far and wide. The simple system operates by gravity, with gates opening to drain the water off to where it is needed.

Elsewhere, in much the same way as in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, smallholders and farmers cultivate a system of furrows and drills to gravity-feed plots from their own collected water. Often these are opened and closed by the simple removal or insertion of a bung of earth.

All this is far less ambitious than what Plato described—that huge hundred-foot-deep canal, more than six hundred feet wide, circumventing the entire plain for around eighteen hundred kilometers with all those crisscrossing interlocking canals. If such a system existed today, it would be one of the wonders of the world, and I suppose it could be argued that that would also have been a valid reason for the Egyptians to have bothered to record it in the first place.

Putting its length into perspective, the distance from the top of northwest Spain to the bottom of the Algarve is only around seven hundred kilometers, less than half of the distance given by Plato for the canal. Granted, it would have been a perfect low-technology system for irrigation and transport, but it would have been a mind-boggling project to construct using only manual labor. As mentioned earlier, the popular consensus has been that it was more a figment of Plato’s imagination than grounded in fact.

Would it have been possible? Perhaps, given a sufficiently long time span and enough available hands, but there would have been considerable obstacles hindering both construction and the operation of the system. Apart from the immense size of the project, there could well have been the problem of getting through the rock. Much of the existing Algarve land contains, or used to, considerable quantities of rock, both in large outcroppings and huge boulders. It is often seen piled on the edges of fields, where farmers are zealously claiming land from nature—but they have the advantage of JCB earthmovers to assist them. No matter where it was situated, in whatever country, excavating to a depth of a hundred
feet along a width of six hundred feet with only pickaxes and spades seems far-fetched.

If Atlantis was southwestern Iberia and the cultivated plain described by Plato was the part that is now submerged, it would possibly have been easier if the soil was similar to the sand-based variety that is currently found along the coastal strip. Even then, a hundred feet is a huge depth, and the likelihood of hitting rock would have been high.

Plato does not enlighten us as to how the system operated. Ideally, it would have had to have been almost on one level; otherwise, a considerable number of locks would have been needed. There is no mention of building materials like cement, so locks would have to have been constructed in stone. Cast metal would have been needed to operate them, unless another system had been devised.

Nevertheless, some sort of organized storage and supply would have been needed to support the large agricultural society that Plato described—though not necessarily on the scale he indicated. It is far more likely that the excess winter water was trapped in separate reservoirs in the foothills as required. It could then be used to gravity-feed the great agricultural area to the south when required. The very gentle slope of the large submerged plain forming the current seabed would have made this possible. That canal at Estômbar could have been servicing one such reservoir and providing an outlet to the river estuary. It would have been essential to reduce the water level in periods of excessive rainfall to avoid flooding. It would have needed to have been of the proportions Plato indicated in order to siphon off sufficient volume in an emergency. In fact, there are vestiges of what could have been such a storage area in the vicinity. Close examination of the area inland between Albufeira and Portimão revealed this very possibility. Running more or less parallel to the coast, there are several interlinking, long, wide, fertile valleys that were once floodplains. An example can be clearly seen from the A22 motorway that runs east to west, between the mountains and the coast. Just east of a town called Lagoa, a few kilometers south of Silves, a long viaduct stretches across and above one of them. Continuing eastward, other small bridges carry the road over narrow, dry river valleys running roughly south. They could once have taken water from the floodplain if it was used as a reservoir to the existing coast and the submerged plain.

These appear to be completely natural—inevitably so, after 11,500 years. It is perfectly feasible that the Atlanteans made use of the natural topography to create vast inland storage areas like these floodplains, bordered on both sides by low hills and ridges. This particular plain has some of the most fertile soil in the Algarve. It could easily be the product of thousands of years of silt and was originally at a much lower level. Incidentally, Lagoa town, which sits at the western end of it, is derived from the Portuguese word for “lake.” Part of these plains still floods after heavy rain, and an area is artificially flooded each summer to grow rice. (
SEE IMAGE
17
IN THE PHOTO INSERT
.)

The width of the canal mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, at Estômbar, is between 130 and 180 meters, which is close to that claimed by Plato. It also approaches Estômbar from the direction of Lagoa. Interestingly, it and the floodplain are at the most northerly point of the existing coastal plain and, therefore, likewise of any submerged plain. That is where Plato said the northern part of his grand canal was. He also said that at one point the excess water was released into the sea. This channel at Estômbar heads straight to the estuary and so to sea. It would have to have been higher than the sea to prevent tidal salt water entering the canal, unless there was a system of gates to let the water out at low tide. If it was only for releasing water in an emergency, the flow might have been strong enough to prevent the sea entering. Eastward, the canal heads back toward Lagoa and the floodplain. Could there have been a connection?

To summarize, supplies of water—both hot and cold—exist in southwest Iberia, exactly as Plato describes, whether from beneath the ground, from rainfall, or from rivers in winter spate. Some of the rivers dry up in summer, so a collection and irrigation system is needed, just as Plato indicated it was 11,600 years ago.

As far as that huge canal system is concerned, most serious Atlantis researchers dismiss it as pure make-believe, or at least exaggerated to a marked degree. To put it into context again, the length was supposedly about the same as the distance from the south coast of Portugal to the south coast of Britain—six hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep all the way. That is just the main canal. There were also many thousands of kilometers of interconnecting waterways.

After nine thousand years it was also most unlikely to have been recorded by the Egyptians to the level of detail Plato expresses. There would have been no real point.

More probably, he was told that there was an amazing, extensive, and efficient water storage and irrigation system and then embellished the facts he had been given to make it sound more impressive. (He was, to say the least, cavalier with his use of mensuration statistics.) It would certainly have been in keeping with his ideas of a wonderfully simple system fit for his perfect state.

It is far more likely that the Atlanteans made use of a combination of man-made and natural land features to produce adequate water supplies when and where needed.

The many rivers, tidal up to a good penetration of the hinterland, were used for the transportation of goods and people. As they do today, boats traveled upstream with the tide and back as it ebbed. Very large rivers—the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir, for example—flow all the year around. Large boats still travel the many kilometers inland to Seville, and during the last century the Guadiana was still used in the export of copper from the mine at São Domingos, which is way up the river. The river Tinto has been used for thousands of years for transport of ore via Niebla from the Rio Tinto mine.

The system I have outlined could have broadly fulfilled the functions Plato described, but on a simpler, less ambitious scale. Alternatively, the search for vestiges of the canal system might be completely pointless, as it could have all disappeared under the sea with the plain.

So, my search was over. There were enough comparisons, most identical, to now be certain that southwest Iberia was the area Plato was referring to. It was Atlantis. But there was still one thing left. I wanted to try to find where one of its cities might have been. What a prize it would be if I could even find the fabled ancient capital. Now that I had established that Atlantis was not an island and some land survived, the site might just still exist.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Quest for the Citadel

P
lato’s clues about the capital give incredibly detailed information including its size, its geology, and the terrain relative to the surrounding area, even down to exacting details for the materials it was built from. Taken with the other clues discussed in the preceding chapters about the geographical location, they specify an utterly unique location. Surely it would be impossible for there to be more than one site on the whole planet that matched all of them. If there is one, that is.

Following is a summary of some of the details I used to help narrow the search.

“The hill, on which the capital was built, not very high on any side, was near the main plain in the center of the ‘island.’ It was fifty stadia [9¼ kilometers] from the sea.” It must have already been connected to the sea when Poseidon first settled there, probably by a tidal river, as clue 25 states that he enclosed the hill by alternate circles of land and sea.

“The Kingdom was divided into ten portions shared among Poseidon’s ten sons. As Atlas was the first born son, he received the most important area, around the citadel. Gadeirus, his twin brother, received the eastern extremity as far as the region around Cádiz.”