10 Real-Life Sunken Cities

When you think about sunken cities, your mind probably jumps right to Atlantis, that super-advanced island nation mentioned in Plato’s works that became really wicked and hedonistic and was eventually relegated to the bottom of the ocean after getting hit with some earthquakes. 

Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists and fans of Aquaman, Atlantis probably didn’t actually exist. As Benjamin Radford writes at Live Science, the island is a “moral fable” of which “no trace … has ever been found despite advances in oceanography and ocean floor mapping in past decades.” 

But luckily for fans of Aquaman, there are plenty of real-life sunken cities, villages, and towns, from a legendary historical city spotted from the air to a village that occasionally ends up back above water. Some of these spots are even called “The Atlantis of X Geographical location.” Let’s dive in.

1. Canopus
2. Thonis-Heracleion
3. Neapolis
4. Pavlopetri
5. Shi Cheng
6. Fabbriche di Careggine
7. Bayocean
8. Dunwich
9. La Balize
10. Rungholt

Canopus

Being up in a plane provides unique opportunities to see the world as you’ve never seen it before—and John T. Cull, a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force, discovered that firsthand in 1933. He was flying over Abu Qir Bay, not far from Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean Coast, when he saw something strange under the waves: Ruins. 

Scholar and Egyptian royal Prince Omar Toussoun got wind of the discovery, and he was intrigued—a number of ancient historians had written about cities that once existed in the area, but no one knew exactly where they were. A biography of Toussoun says that he consulted with local fishermen, who confirmed the presence of ruins in an area about a mile offshore. A diver employed by Toussoun found marble columns, the remains of structures, and a statue of Alexander the Great (or just the head of a statue of Alexander the Great—sources differ). 

The site’s true significance wasn’t known until the 1990s, when it was confirmed to be part of the ancient Canopic region, featuring towns like Canopus.

Thonis-Heracleion

Canopus wasn’t the only sunken city lurking in the area. In the early 2000s, divers working nearby hauled up a huge stone fragment from under mud and silt on the seabed. Soon, they found another six pieces of stone, alongside other artifacts like pottery, jewelry, and coins. The stone pieces comprised a statue of Hapy, god of the Nile, which had once stood over ancient port city Thonis-Heracleion. 

Thonis-Heracleion was founded more than 2000 years ago and was spread across several islands. Both Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus experienced rising sea levels; the cities may have been condemned to the depths by liquefaction caused by an earthquake that occurred in the 8th century CE. The artifacts being brought up by divers hadn’t seen the surface for more than a thousand years.

Archaeologist Franck Goddio described the process of finding the ruins to the Financial Times, saying, “There was a long preparatory period before we could even think of putting divers into the water. It is like modern medicine. A surgeon would not consider doing an operation before gathering as much information about the patient from medical records, scans, X-rays and so on.” First, they analyzed ancient texts to zero in on a location for Thonis-Heracleion, which they then mapped with advanced technology that further narrowed their target area. Only then could divers get into the water. Among the discoveries they made on the sea floor were huge statues, a massive temple, and more than 60 ships. One of the artifacts brought up from the depths was a stele that Goddio said “solved an ancient mystery by showing that the cities of Heracleion [its Greek name] and Thonis [the Egyptian name] were the same place.”

Neapolis

Founded in the 5th century BCE on the coast of North Africa, Neapolis did major business in the fermented fish-based sauce garum—in fact, it may have been the largest manufacturer of garum in the Ancient Roman world. Unfortunately, though, most of the town was wiped off the map in July 365 CE after a strong earthquake (maybe 8.5 magnitude by modern measurements) triggered a huge tsunami that also damaged Alexandria and Crete. In 2017, ruins of the city were discovered near Nabeul on the northeast coast of Tunisia. The site, which was around 50 acres, included not just streets and monuments but also somewhere in the area of a hundred tanks to make garum. “Probably the notables of Neapolis owed their fortune to garum,” expedition head Mounir Fantar said after the discovery.  

Pavlopetri

One of the oldest submerged cities in the world can be found in Vatika Bay in southeastern Peloponnese, Greece. The Bronze Age settlement, whose modern name is Pavlopetri, is more than 5000 years old. According to the World Monuments Fund, the city was inhabited from the 3rd millennium until about 1100 BCE. Like the other cities we’ve discussed so far, at least one  natural disaster sent it to the bottom of the sea —and maybe an earthquake as well. Man, natural disasters really have it out for ancient cities, huh? The site was discovered in 1967. There are streets, buildings, and even burial areas. Sadly, because many ships anchor in Vatika Bay, Pavlopetri is threatened by pollution and, because access to the site isn’t restricted, looting.

Shi Cheng

So far, all of the sunken cities we’ve featured have ended up underwater because of natural disasters, but that’s not always the case. Take, for example, Shi Cheng, or “Lion City,” in China’s Zhejiang province. The more than 1300-year-old city was flooded in 1959 to create a reservoir and hydroelectric station for a nearby town. For decades, Shi Cheng sat quietly forgotten about 130 feet under the surface of Qiandao Lake until the Chinese government sent an expedition there in the early 2000s. The ruins—which include streets, entrance gates, and archways featuring carvings of lions, dragons, and phoenixes, as well as walls that the BBC says date back to the 16th century—are remarkably well-preserved by the water. Shi Cheng wasn’t the only city that ended up under the reservoir: He Cheng, an even older city, is also in the lake, as are 27 other towns and nearly 1400 villages, per the website Amusing Planet. Nearly 300,000 people were relocated to nearby provinces.

Fabbriche di Careggine

In the mid-1900s, after its residents were relocated, several stone houses and a church that comprised the 12th or 13th century village of Fabbriche di Careggine were flooded for a new hydroelectric dam. The difference between this town and our other sunken cities is that it occasionally resurfaces when the lake it’s under is emptied to allow maintenance on the dam. The lake has been emptied four times so far; the last one, in 1994 attracted around a million spectators. There has been talk in recent years of draining the lake again; according to an Italian news outlet, a previously planned draining was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Bayocean

Bayocean, Oregon, a resort town once known as “The Atlantic City of the West,” was the brainchild of the Potter family; patriarch TB Potter was a real estate tycoon. According to Oregon Field Guide, Potter’s teenage son, Thomas, was vacationing in Oregon and spotted a narrow, four-mile-long piece of sand in Tillamook Bay, which he supposedly got to hike firsthand when retrieving the carcass of a goose he’d shot. Portland resident Jerry Sutherland told Oregon Field Guide in 2020 that “From the high ridge line that ran down the southern portion of the spit, you could see both the bay on one side and the ocean on the other.” 

Potter and his father bought the land and made plans to build a hotel, heated pool, dance hall, and bowling alley, and sell land so people could build summer homes. They even worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a jetty to ensure the water around their resort town was nice and calm.

Things were good—until they weren’t. Bayocean’s spit was made of sand, and you can’t always depend on features like that to stay the same. Two families who owned summer cottages in Bayocean found that out firsthand when they showed up for the summer only to find that their homes had vanished into the sea. Other homes followed. The jetty that calmed Bayocean’s waters also caused its sand to be washed away, making the situation worse. Before long, the bottom of Bayocean’s pool was exposed over the beach (it was eventually destroyed in a storm in the 1930s), and the population of the town dwindled. By the 1950s, the town was abandoned; about two decades later, the sea took the spit’s last structure—a garage.

Dunwich

In the 1960s, according to the BBC, fishermen working off the coast of Suffolk in England found that their nets kept snagging on stuff under the water. That inspired Stuart Bacon, a marine archaeologist, to give in the area, where he discovered the remains of a church that had fallen into the sea in 1911. It had been the last structure standing in a city called Dunwich—a.k.a. “Britain’s Atlantis.” 

In 1225, the port encompassed an area the size of London, and was home to some 4500 people. But that was all before 1286, when severe storms began pounding the city. According to Sky History, by the 1300s, the harbor was blocked, cliffs had collapsed, and hundreds of houses had been destroyed. Only a small village remains there today.

Dunwich had something of a legendary status until 2008, when David Sear, a professor in the University of Southampton’s Department of Geography and Environmental Science, decided to analyze the seabed in an area he’d identified using a Tudor-era map. With sonar, he discovered, according to the BBC, “medieval Blackfriars monastery, St Nicholas Church, St Peter’s Church, All Saints, St Katherine’s Chapel and chunks of masonry that could have been the town hall and various port buildings” of Dunwich.  

Dunwich isn’t the only town to have been swept to sea in the region; sources differ, but according to some researchers, more than 300 settlements on the North Sea coast met the same fate in the last 900 years; others put the number at 150 over 1000 years. 

La Balize

In the early 1700s, the French built a fort on what would later become Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana and named it La Balize. The place was apparently infested with alligators, leading one explorer to comment, “It seems a mystery how these obviously voracious creatures are able to find prey enough to still their hunger.” And that wasn’t its only issue: La Balize was basically in a low-lying swamp, and it was extremely vulnerable to hurricanes. It first got wiped out in 1740; the town was rebuilt in a slightly different location, but it wasn’t long before it got destroyed again. Because the settlement was strategically important, the town persevered despite being repeatedly battered by storms. The settlement was abandoned in the 1860s and a new town was built a few miles upriver. About 100 years ago, all that remained of the settlement were some headstones and an “ancient iron tomb,” in the words of one visitor. 

Rungholt

In 1362, Rungholt, a trading hub on the German coast of the North Sea, was swept away by a storm surge. Its ruins were found in the mud near Hallig Südfall island with the help of magnetic surveys, which identified a number of mounds the settlement was built on as well as the foundations of what the researchers believe to be a church, which was found in 2023.

Legend has it that the town was wiped away because of its wickedness, but Runghold’s demise may have had more to do with where it was built. According to an archaeologist from Kiel University in Germany, Rungholt’s builders radically altered the landscape of the area—which was basically uninhabitable—when they constructed the settlement: 

“This backfired on them because they created huge vulnerabilities. With rising sea levels and increasing storminess, one day these dikes they built were not sufficient enough, and these settlements just drowned. Everything was destroyed.”

Earth was also in the midst of a Little Ice Age, which made conditions even more volatile. Historian Mitchell Hammond (who was not involved in the research) told the CBC that Rungholt is “a cautionary tale for coastlines today in an era of even more profound climate upheaval.”

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This story was adapted from an episode of The List Show. Subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube for more fascinating videos.