The weird story of Atlantropa

From Atlas Obscura, a recount of Atlantropa, a wild idea to drain the Mediterranean and merge Africa and Europe (and yes, it was real):

Back in 1929, [Herman] Sörgel wrote a book on his ideas under the title The Panropa Project, Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara. Three years later he rebranded his project in another book, called Atlantropa, the name by which his utopian project is still remembered. Persistence must have been one of Sörgels main character traits, because until his death in 1952, he kept on defending Atlantropa in four books, over a thousand publications and countless lectures, enough to fill up a special section in the archive of the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Not hampered by any sense of reality or modesty, Sörgel’s Atlantropa design envisioned three gigantic dams which dwarf contemporary superstructures like China’s Three Gorges Dam. The biggest barrage would be built across the Straits of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, separating the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. A second dam would block the Dardanelles and shut off the Black Sea. As if that were not enough, a third dam would stretch out between Sicily and Tunisia, cutting the Mediterranean in two, with different water levels on either side. 

Racists gon’ racist.

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