Atlas
50 Waters
The List of Symbolic Waters
Water is the blood of the Earth.
It remembers the first breath of cells
and the tears of conquest.
8 chapters · From the Arctic to the conquest of space · A human odyssey
Since the origin of the Earth, water shapes the landscapes, accompanies the appearance of life and runs through human history.
These fifty waters, drawn from symbolic places on the planet, compose a simple narrative: that of the Earth and the odyssey of humanity.
Chapter One
The water of the world's first mornings
No. 01
Water of the polar world
The Arctic Ocean covers 14 million km². Its sea ice regulates the temperature of the entire planet by reflecting the sun's rays. Without this white mirror, the Earth would warm twice as fast. The Arctic is the world's thermostat.
No. 02
Antarctica
Water of the white continent
Antarctica holds 70% of the planet's fresh water, locked in an ice sheet 34 million years old. Its ice cores let us read 800,000 years of Earth's climate, layer by layer, like the pages of a book no one had yet opened.
No. 03
Greenland, Denmark
Water of the primordial glaciers
The Sermeq Kujalleq glacier, one of the most active in the world, produces 46 km³ of ice a year. The icebergs that break from it can take 15,000 years to form. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, this bay is one of the most spectacular windows onto our planet's climate history.
No. 04
Wyoming, United States
Water of the Earth's inner fire
Yellowstone sits on one of the largest active supervolcanoes on the planet. It holds more than 10,000 geysers and hydrothermal springs, half of all those on Earth. The Old Faithful geyser has erupted every 90 minutes for centuries, with the precision of a clock. Here the Earth breathes out loud.
No. 05
Asia
Water of Asia's glaciers
Born of the collision between India and Asia 50 million years ago, the Himalayan range stretches 2,400 km and counts more than 100 peaks above 7,000 metres. On the summit of Everest, marine fossils can still be found: the roof of the world was once an ocean floor. With the largest store of ice after the poles, the Himalaya feeds the great rivers of Asia, from the Indus to the Mekong, and nearly two billion people drink its water. It is the Earth's third pole.
No. 06
Phang Nga, Thailand
Water that carves the stone
In the Andaman Sea, off Phuket, more than forty limestone islets rise from the water like towers, Thai cousins of those in Ha Long Bay. This rock formed on the floor of an ancient sea some 250 million years ago. Since then, rain, waves and tides have hollowed out caves, arches and hidden lagoons in its cliffs. Here water is a slow sculptor that has never stopped working.
No. 07
Vietnam
Water of the primeval forests
The Cúc Phương forest is one of the oldest tropical forests in Southeast Asia: some of its trees are over 1,000 years old and reach 70 metres in height. It survived ice ages, wars and the defoliants of Agent Orange. The water that seeps from its limestone rocks is water that came alive through times when everything else burned.
Chapter Two
The water of the first steps
No. 08
Tanzania
Water of the cradle of humanity
1.8 million years ago, Homo habilis made the first cut-stone tools in history here. Olduvai Gorge, carved by an ancient dried-up lake in the Rift Valley, has yielded more human fossils than any other site on Earth. It is here that humanity began to transform the world.
No. 09
Kenya
Water of the first peoples
Lake Turkana is the largest desert lake in the world: 250 km long in the heart of an arid region. Its shores have yielded human fossils 4 million years old, including the famous Turkana Boy, an almost complete Homo erectus skeleton 1.6 million years old. The water that remains here saw several species of the genus Homo come into being.
No. 10
Morocco
Water of the first human face
In 2017, fossils found here pushed back the appearance of Homo sapiens to 300,000 years ago, 100,000 years earlier than had been believed. The first known human face looked up at this sky, drank this water, walked on this ground. The Moroccan desert is the nursery of modern humanity.
No. 11
Botswana
Water of the first beliefs
These four quartzite hills in the middle of the Kalahari carry more than 4,500 rock paintings, the greatest concentration of rock art in the world. Human presence is documented for 100,000 years. For the San peoples, the Tsodilo Hills are where the gods first set foot. The place where humanity invented meaning.
No. 12
Northern Territory, Australia
Water of the oldest continuous human presence
Aboriginal peoples have lived in Kakadu for 65,000 years without interruption: the oldest known continuous human presence on Earth. Its 20,000 rock art sites tell an unbroken story of humanity. The water of the dry and wet seasons sets the rhythm of a civilisation older than any other.
No. 13
Dordogne, France
Water of the first artists
17,000 years ago, men entered the cave of Lascaux and painted 600 animals with astonishing mastery of movement and perspective. They lived beside the Vézère: it is this river water that is collected. The everyday water of the first humans who felt the need to create beauty.
Chapter Three
The water of gods and myths
No. 14
Wiltshire, England
Water of the mystery of time
Built between 3000 and 1500 BC, Stonehenge is precisely aligned with the summer and winter solstices. Some of its stones were transported from Wales, 280 km away. No writing, no name, no explanation. Just stones raised towards the sky, and the River Avon flowing below, as it always has.
No. 15
Benin
Water where the visible and the invisible touch
Lake Nokoué is the cradle of Beninese Vodun, one of the most complex and most misunderstood cosmogonies in the world. On its waters stands Ganvié, a lake city of 30,000 inhabitants, founded in the 17th century by peoples fleeing slave traders. This water carries both the birth of the sacred and the act of resistance that saved a whole people.
No. 16
Peru / Bolivia
Water of the Andean myths
3,812 metres above sea level: the highest navigable lake in the world. 8,400 km² of surface. For the Incas, the sun itself was born from its waters. The Island of the Sun, at its centre, is the mythical birthplace of Manco Capac, founder of the Inca empire. This lake is both a cosmos and a source: the sky laid upon the Earth.
No. 17
Northern Territory, Australia
Water of the Earth's ancient heart
This red sandstone monolith, 348 metres high and 9.4 km around, has been sacred to the Anangu people for 10,000 years. When rain falls on Uluru, it runs down its flanks in cascades along precise paths that oral tradition has described for millennia. Water and rock tell the same story together.
No. 18
Saudi Arabia
Water of the spiritual centre
In an arid valley of the Hejaz mountains, with neither river nor lake, Mecca welcomes 2.5 million pilgrims every year for the Hajj, the largest peaceful human gathering in the world. At the heart of the sanctuary, the well of Zamzam has flowed without interruption for 4,000 years according to Islamic tradition. Its water is the most transported, the most preserved, the most shared in the name of faith.
No. 19
India
Water of the sacred desert
In western Rajasthan, the Thar Desert receives less than 250 mm of rain a year. To survive, the inhabitants dug stepwells, the baoris: Chand Baori, at Abhaneri, descends thirteen levels and nearly 3,500 steps to the cool water. At Pushkar, a lake that Hindus count among the most sacred in India draws pilgrims from all over the world. Here every drop is kept like a treasure and honoured like an offering.
No. 20
Indonesia
Water that purifies and binds
At Tampaksiring, in the heart of Bali, a spring rises from the ground and has fed the temple of Tirta Empul, "the water that gushes forth", since the year 962. Balinese Hindus bathe here under some thirty stone spouts in a purification ritual called melukat: their Hinduism is often called Agama Tirta, the religion of holy water. The same water then flows down into the terraced rice fields, shared from basin to basin by the subak, irrigation cooperatives inscribed by UNESCO in 2012. Here, water binds together the gods, people and the land.
No. 21
Rome, Italy
Water of the breath of faith
The smallest state in the world, 44 hectares, is the spiritual centre of 1.4 billion Catholics. St Peter's Basilica, built over the tomb of the apostle Peter, is the most visited Christian pilgrimage site in the world. The monumental fountains of St Peter's Square have flowed without interruption since the 17th century: a water that has never stopped.
Chapter Four
The water of the builders
No. 22
Upper Egypt
Water of cosmic resurrection
At Luxor rise the temples of Karnak and Luxor: 3,400 years of history built in stone. The annual flood of the Nile, which covered the fields each summer, was for the Egyptians the death and resurrection of Osiris. Priests measured its level on the nilometer with absolute precision, for too little water meant famine, and too much meant catastrophe.
No. 23
Egypt
Water of the pharaohs
The pyramids of Giza were built around 2560 BC. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, 146 metres high, remained the tallest monument in the world for 3,800 years. It is made of 2.3 million blocks of stone. The Nile, which then flowed a few hundred metres away, carried these stones from Aswan. Without the river, no pyramids.
No. 24
Greece
Water of maritime myths
This archipelago of 220 islands in the heart of the Aegean Sea is the cradle of ancient Greek civilisation. From 3000 BC, Cycladic civilisation developed art, trade and navigation here. From these waters set out the founding myths of the West: Odysseus, Icarus, Theseus. The Aegean is the first great school of human thought.
No. 25
Italy
Water of imperial power
At its height in the 2nd century, Rome had a million inhabitants: the first megacity in history. Eleven aqueducts supplied the city with a million cubic metres of water a day. The Tiber carried grain from all over the world. Roman law, born on its banks, still structures the legal systems of more than 150 countries today.
No. 26
France
Water of European memory
Begun in 1163 on the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, Notre-Dame is the most visited monument in Europe: 13 million visitors a year before the fire of 2019. It has come through wars, revolutions, centuries. The Seine has flowed around it for 850 years. In April 2019, the whole world watched its spire fall, and understood what it stood for.
No. 27
Italy
Water of an improbable city
Built on 118 islets linked by 400 bridges, Venice rests on 10 million wooden piles driven into the lagoon. In the Middle Ages it invented modern banking, double-entry bookkeeping, international trade. At its height in the 15th century, it controlled trade between East and West. A city born of the impossible, built on water to survive war.
No. 28
Cambodia
Water of the Khmer empire
Angkor Wat is the largest religious complex in the world: 400 km². In the 12th century the Khmer empire built an extraordinary hydraulic system: barays, canals and reservoirs able to irrigate 900 km² of rice fields and feed a million people. When this system collapsed, the city was abandoned. Water had built everything. Its absence destroyed everything.
No. 29
Peru
Water of the Inca civilisation
Built around 1450 at 2,430 metres above sea level, Machu Picchu is linked to a network of fountains and canals that capture the water of sixteen natural springs. The Incas had calculated that the city would receive exactly the quantity of water it needed: neither too much, nor too little. Abandoned during the Spanish conquest, rediscovered in 1911, intact, as if time had stopped.
Chapter Five
The water of great horizons
No. 30
South Africa
Water of the planetary passage
In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded this cape for the first time, opening the sea route between Europe and Asia. The world would never be the same again. Here the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet, two bodies of water with radically different temperatures and currents. A cape that changed the world economy for five centuries.
No. 31
Guadeloupe, Caribbean, France
Water of the last morning before
On 3 November 1493, Christopher Columbus reached Marie-Galante on his second voyage. Here began the irreversible transformation of the world: the meeting of two humanities that had ignored each other for millennia. The water of this island was the last water of a world still intact.
No. 32
United States
Water of hope and globalisation
Between 1892 and 1954, 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island, in New York Bay. They came from Europe, fleeing poverty and persecution. The Statue of Liberty, 93 metres tall, was the first thing they saw in the mist of the Hudson. New York became the first world city, born of water and of the hope of the uprooted.
No. 33
United States
Water of the path of the god
Kealakekua, "the path of the god" in Hawaiian, is a sacred bay on the island of Hawaii. For more than a thousand years, Polynesians lived here nearly 4,000 km from any continental land, in one of the most isolated archipelagos on the planet. In January 1779, during the Makahiki, the season dedicated to the god Lono, Captain James Cook dropped anchor here. He was killed on the shore on 14 February. In this turquoise water, two worlds that had ignored each other met, and nothing remained closed.
No. 34
New South Wales, Australia
Water of the stream that founded a city
In January 1788 the First Fleet, eleven ships from England, gives up on Botany Bay for lack of fresh water and anchors in Sydney Cove. A stream runs there, the Tank Stream, from which the Gadigal, the first people of these shores, had drunk for millennia. It becomes the colony's spring, then its sewer. From 1860 it is gradually covered over. It still runs today, unseen, beneath the streets of Sydney: the water that founded the city, buried by it.
No. 35
Paris, France
Water of the industrial age
Built in 1889 for the Universal Exhibition, the Eiffel Tower was then the tallest structure in the world: 330 metres. It is made of 7,300 tonnes of puddled iron. The Seine flows 500 metres away. This monument, mocked at its birth, became the symbol of industrial modernity and the most visited structure in the world: 7 million visitors a year.
Chapter Six
The water of the price of freedom
No. 36
France
Water of the price of freedom
On 6 June 1944, 156,000 Allied soldiers landed on five Normandy beaches. It was the largest amphibious operation in history. 10,000 of them lost their lives there. The English Channel, cold and grey, is the water that separates servitude from freedom. That day, Europe began to rise again.
No. 37
South Africa
Water of resistance
On this Atlantic island, 12 km from Cape Town, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, from 1964 to 1982. The cold water around the island is an invisible prison. In 1990 Mandela walked free, and in 1994 became the first Black president of South Africa. Robben Island is the water of a dignity that resists everything inflicted on it.
No. 38
Germany
Water of the abolished border
From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall cut a city, and a world, in two. The Spree ran through it, indifferent to ideologies. Men died trying to swim it. On 9 November 1989, the Wall fell. The water had always been the same on both sides. It was humanity that had forgotten to look at it.
No. 39
South Korea
Water of the unfinished peace
Korea was torn apart by war from 1950 to 1953, and Seoul changed hands four times. The armistice was never replaced by a peace treaty: a militarised border still crosses the peninsula, and the Han River, which borders the capital, flows into the sea a few kilometres from that line. Yet on its banks the city has known a dazzling rise in a few decades, the "Miracle on the Han River". And in the heart of the city, a stream, the Cheonggyecheon, buried under a motorway, was restored to daylight in 2005. Here, water reminds us that what was buried can be repaired.
Chapter Seven
The water we failed to keep
No. 40
Tanzania
Water of the last snows
5,895 metres: the roof of Africa. Its summit glaciers have lost 85% of their surface since 1912. Scientists predict their total disappearance before 2040. This equatorial snow, suspended between sky and savannah, supplies water to millions of people in the valleys below. When it is gone, Kilimanjaro will be nothing but black rock under the sun.
No. 41
Zimbabwe / Zambia
Water of original power
1,708 metres wide, 108 metres high. Victoria Falls is the largest curtain of water in the world, twice as wide as Niagara Falls. The Kololo people call them Mosi-oa-Tunya: the smoke that thunders. They have existed for 100,000 years, long before humans gave them a name. Today their flow declines every year: global warming threatens this wonder.
No. 42
Botswana
Water of the river that never reaches the sea
The Okavango runs 1,600 km from the highlands of Angola, crosses the Kalahari and is lost in the desert, never reaching the sea. This inland delta of 15,000 km² is one of the richest ecological sanctuaries in the world. The water evaporates entirely into the sand. An absolute generosity, with no return and no witness.
No. 43
Botswana / Namibia / South Africa
Water of invisible survival
The Kalahari covers 900,000 km². The San peoples have lived here for 20,000 years with no apparent source of water: they draw moisture from roots, tubers and wild melons. Their knowledge of invisible water is the most sophisticated there is. To survive here is to read the Earth like a text.
No. 44
China / Myanmar / Laos / Thailand / Cambodia / Vietnam
Water that feeds kingdoms
4,900 km. The Mekong crosses six countries and directly feeds 60 million people. Its tributary lake, the Tonlé Sap in Cambodia, reverses its current twice a year, a phenomenon unique in the world. On its banks the Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese civilisations were born. It is to Southeast Asia what the Nile is to Egypt. Today, dams built upstream disrupt its floods and endanger the rhythm that fed an entire world.
No. 45
Brazil
Water of the lungs of the Earth
The Amazon River discharges 20% of all the fresh water that reaches the planet's oceans. The Amazon forest produces its own rain: flying rivers of water vapour travel through the air for thousands of kilometres. In a century, 17% of this forest has disappeared. With it vanishes a water that did not fall from the sky: it was made.
No. 46
Queensland, Australia
Water of original life
2,300 km long: the largest living ecosystem on Earth, visible from space. Built by tiny organisms over 500,000 years, it shelters 9,000 species. Since 1985 it has lost 50% of its corals to ocean warming. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living being that humanity is in the process of losing.
Chapter Eight
The water we will carry
No. 47
Arizona, United States
Water of the living Earth
446 km long, 1,800 metres deep. The Colorado took 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, exposing 2 billion years of Earth's geology in its walls. It is the greatest history book of the Earth ever written. Today the Colorado is exhausted before it reaches the sea, drunk entirely by Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
No. 48
Chile
Water of absolute absence
The driest desert in the world: some areas have not received rain in 400 years. Its extreme conditions make it the natural laboratory closest to the conditions of the planet Mars. Researchers study forms of life here that can survive without water. What is learned here will serve to settle other worlds.
No. 49
Bolivia
Water of the celestial mirror
10,582 km² of salt: the largest salt flat in the world, at 3,656 metres above sea level. A former dried-up lake, Uyuni holds 50 to 70% of the world's lithium reserves, the metal of electric batteries. When it rains, a thin layer of water turns the salt flat into a perfect mirror of the sky. The future of energy lies beneath this reflecting water.
No. 50
Provence, France
Water that fish will drink among the stars
At Cadarache, scientists are working on sending fish eggs to the Moon to feed future human bases. Water, the absolute condition of life on Earth for 3.8 billion years, becomes the condition of life elsewhere. If humanity one day leaves this planet, it will take its water with it, as it has always carried what is essential.
These fifty waters tell a simple and universal story.
From the first oceans to space exploration projects, water accompanies every stage of the history of the world. We were born from water. We built our civilisations through water. And if humanity must one day extend beyond this planet, it will take its water with it.
Water is the memory of the world.
And the key to our future.