Hyperobject

It was a scorching hot day in the Spanish heartland when, on a whim, I took the road less travelled, following signs towards the alluringly mysterious “Ciudad Encantada”. It turned out to be no city at all, but certainly enchanted – Ciudad Encantada looks like nothing I’ve seen before. The fact that it’s hard to describe what it even is, is what makes it linger in my mind all this time afterwards. It’s why I’m writing this piece. So, how to describe it… Ciudad Encantada looks like something that playful alien invaders could have left behind, before they went looking for a livelier planet. It looks also, perhaps, like a sculpture park that Salvador Dali might have dreamt up, if he’d been born a giant and had wanted to pick the most remote countryside corner to make sure nobody found his work. It’s really a natural rock formation, formed 250 million years ago when what’s now a mountainous area at more than 1500 metres altitude, was the floor of the Tethys Ocean. That’s very hard to…