Bermuda Triangle
Attractions refers to the following countries:BermudaBermuda , Puerto RicoBERMUDA , PUERTO RICO , UNITED STATES OF AMERICACubaBahamasDominican Republic , Dominican RepublicBritish Virgin Islands , British Virgin IslandsBritish Virgin Islands , American Virgin IslandsAntigua and BarbudaThe Bermuda Triangle is a legendary location in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean. It is said that here in the skies there are unexplained atmospheric phenomena that destroy airplanes, and on the sea suddenly appear giant killer waves and whirlpools, dragging ships to the bottom. Mystics call the triangle “diabolical” and inhabit its waters with deep-sea monsters. The Bermuda Triangle has become part of global popular culture, like the ghostly Flying Dutchman. The scary stories lightly tickle the nerves of impressionable tourists vacationing in the region – in the tropical resorts of Puerto Rico, Florida, the Bahamas and Bermuda.
Video: Bermuda Triangle – reality or fiction?
. Contents- Highlights
- History and disasters in the Bermuda Triangle
- Geography
- Climate
- Interesting places
Bermuda Triangle Resorts - Cruises
- Shopping
- Local food
- Transportation
- How to get there
Highlights
In the brilliant story The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, Ernest Hemingway described a Cuban fisherman Santiago’s dramatic duel with a giant marlin. The strong fish carried the old man’s boat far out into the ocean, into the confines of the Bermuda Triangle. But the writer never once mentioned this intriguing name, because then it did not exist. Only in the mid-1960s began to appear publications about strange incidents and mysterious disasters in the same region of the Atlantic. This anomalous location folded into an imaginary triangle located east of the coast of the Florida Peninsula (USA).
.Indeed, the compass sometimes malfunctions here, and amazing geologic and physical anomalies have been discovered in the depths of the waters of the Bermuda Triangle. The ocean floor is home to the deepest abyss in the Atlantic. Next to Bermuda is the Sargasso Sea, an algae-covered water area unparalleled in the world’s oceans. Finally, some researchers believe that in this area of the ocean went to the bottom of the legendary Atlantis, and send well-equipped expeditions to search for the sunken island.
.
At the same time, the Bermuda Triangle has become a fashionable brand of beach vacation in international tourism. Back in the first half of the last century, the remote tropical archipelagos of the Western Atlantic turned into popular resorts. Nowadays, the region has a developed tourist infrastructure, many islands have offshore financial centers with tax benefits.
.
History and Disasters in the Bermuda Triangle
In early October 1492, Christopher Columbus’ caravels entered a strange coastless sea, later called the Sargasso Sea. The ocean surface was covered with reed-like algae dotted with bubbles that looked like grape berries. Here Spanish sailors first entered the confines of the Bermuda Triangle.
On the evening of October 11, the admiral noticed a dim flickering light on the horizon. Columbus summoned one of his companions to the deck, and the latter also viewed the distant sparks. In the diary of the expedition this sight was described as the flame of an altar candle, which was rising and falling. Thus, the chronicle of Columbus’ voyage recorded the first strange phenomena in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle.
.
Perhaps navigators had visited the Sargasso Sea much earlier. Ancient authors described the route of the Carthaginian seafarer Himilkon. In the 6th century BC he sailed across the Atlantic from Gibraltar to the British Isles. The traveler described a sea covered in algae that was home to creepy monsters.”
The 12th century Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Sicily, also reported a part of the ocean west of the Iberian Peninsula dangerous to navigation. It was discovered by the sailing ship of Emir Ahmad ibn Umar in the 930s. The emir warned sailors about floating algae entangling the stern, which prevented them from steering the ship. Idrisi’s writings were probably part of the reading circle of Admiral Columbus, who studied geography in depth.
.Within the Sargasso Sea lie the Bermuda Islands, overlooked by Columbus. This archipelago immortalizes the name of the discoverer, Spanish navigator Juan de Bermudez, who landed here in 1505 on his way to the New World. These remote islands were uninhabited and inhabited only by animals and birds. It is 1,035 kilometers west to the coast of North America, and the nearest island of Puerto Rico is 1,537 kilometers south.
.
There are 180 coral islands in the Bermuda Archipelago, formed on top of ancient underwater volcanoes. The archipelago has a small area of only 53.3 km².
.
The first known shipwreck off Bermuda occurred in 1543. This event is captured in an inscription of Portuguese sailors scratched into one of the coastal rocks. The barely recognizable graffiti has survived to this day.
.Tropical storms are not uncommon in the region, and dozens of other sailing ships have crashed on Bermuda’s reefs following the Portuguese caravel. Surviving sailors told of eerie screams in the skies above the islands at night, of chilling stomps in the forest floor. They probably heard the screams of the endemic Bermudian petrels, which make shocking sounds, and the movements of wild boars, which are abundant in Bermuda. But the shipwrecked men were convinced that they were the spirits of the drowned sailors, and one navigator said he could clearly recognize the familiar voices of the dead crew members. Since then, the Bermuda archipelago became a cursed place forever, superstitious sailors marked it on maps as Demoniorum Insulam – “Demon Islands.”
.
Curiously, the settlement of deserted Bermuda is directly related to a shipwreck. In 1609, the English passenger sailing ship Sea Venture struck a reef here. On board the ship were families of colonists bound for North America. Many of them were rescued from the sinking ship. The colonists liked the archipelago and decided to stay here forever. The coat of arms of Bermuda depicts the moment of the Sea Venture wreck accompanied by the motto “Where fate leads us”. This disaster is also reflected in world literature – it inspired playwright William Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.”
.
The abandoned sailing ship was taken to the port of Gibraltar, where an investigation into the incident was conducted. The cargo and personal belongings of the sailors remained intact, no signs of struggle or destruction were found on the ship, so that suspicions of a pirate attack were not confirmed. The fate of the crew and the reasons that forced people to leave the undamaged ship, it was not possible to find out.
.
Two years later, English writer Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the short story “The Statement of J. Habakuk Jackson” with the fictional story of the disappearance of the crew of the brig. This work by the famous novelist brought the Bermuda Triangle to the attention of readers, but interest in the remote region soon waned. Even the wreck in the Bermuda Triangle frigate Atalanta with cadets of the Royal Naval Academy on board caused only regret of the British. The disaster happened in 1880, experts believed that the old sailing ship failed to cope with the stormy waves.
.
The first modern apologists for fantastic versions of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances were American writers John W. Spencer, Richard Wiener, Charles Berlitz, and other authors, who are moving in the field of paranormal theories. Their books with catchy titles “The Devil’s Triangle”, “The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle” and others in the 1970’s spread around the world in multi-million copies in 45 languages.
.
Attempts by experts to reasonably explain the disappearances of ships and airplanes in this region known for tropical storms and treacherous coastal reefs have not satisfied the public. Rumors of missing ships, surrounded by a mystical veil, and now give abundant food to authors of adventure novels, screenwriters of science fiction films, computer game developers.
.
Meanwhile, experienced sailors say that a much greater risk to shipping is, for example, Drake Passage with its hurricane-force winds, chaotic 12-meter waves, floating icebergs and unpredictable currents. According to marine experts, the Bermuda Triangle is not even among the top 10 most dangerous waters in the world’s oceans.
.
That said, the Bermuda Triangle is the world’s crossroads of busy ocean routes and intercontinental air traffic. Every day, planes from a multitude of flights fly over it, linking the United States with cities in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Miami Airport in Florida alone receives and departs more than 458,000 passenger and cargo airliner flights annually. Most of these air routes fly over world-famous waters.
.
Statistics show that the dangers of the Bermuda Triangle are many times exaggerated. Taking into account the intensity of traffic, the number of transportation accidents here is not higher than in other regions of the world’s oceans. The most authoritative source of information about lost ships, the British insurance organization Lloyd’s of London, is also not prone to mystical illusions.
.’
Geography
The famous Bermuda Triangle has never been recorded on official geographical charts or in nautical lodges of the North Atlantic Ocean. But adherents of the theory of mysterious catastrophes in the region confidently draw its outlines.
.
According to an early publication in the New York magazine Argosy (1964), the western apex of the triangle lies off the Florida peninsula, near the city of Miami. From there, a straight line is drawn northeast to the Bermuda Archipelago, an overseas possession of Great Britain. Here is the second vertex of the imaginary geometric figure. From Bermuda, the line turns south and reaches the harbor of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. From there, the line runs southwest, passes the island of Haiti and Cuba, crosses the Bahamas chain and ends at its starting point in Florida. Thus, the total area of the unexplained disaster zone is approximately 1,300,000 km².
.
Of course, this definition of the shaky cordons of the Bermuda Triangle is very tentative. Depending on the location of the crash of another yacht or the disappearance of a private plane, the authors of sensationalist reports easily move the boundaries of the Devil’s Triangle in one direction or another, from the Caribbean Sea all the way to the coast of Ireland.
.
Within the ominous triangle is the deepest location in the Atlantic Ocean, the Puerto Rico Bottom Trench with a maximum depth of 8376 meters. This underwater anomaly is known as “Milwaukee Deep” (after the name of a U.S. Navy cruiser) – the warship’s echo sounder operators discovered the abyss in 1939. Texas millionaire and extreme traveler Victor Lance Viscovo plunged into this underwater abyss in a specially built Limiting Factor deep-sea submersible in December 2018.
The Puerto Rico Trench is a lithospheric plate fault. The submarine canyon extends 800 kilometers between Cuba and the Greater Antilles. Periodic movements of sections of the Earth’s crust cause earthquakes in this region. One of the most powerful cataclysms occurred in 2010 when an earthquake destroyed cities on the island of Haiti.
.
Climate
Winters in the region are mild, warm, frost or snow has never been observed here. In the northeast, in the area of Bermuda, in January and February, the air temperature varies within +15…+20 °С. And in the south, in Puerto Rico, reigns eternal summer with an annual temperature range of +22 … +32 ° C.
.From April through November, the region is prone to rainy cyclones, gale force winds and strong hurricanes. One of the most powerful storms of recent decades raged through Bermuda in 2014. But it was surpassed by Hurricane Paulette, which swept over the archipelago from west to east at 169 kilometers per hour in September 2020. The hurricane was accompanied by torrential rains, deafening thunderclaps and lightning that occurred every second. The eastward-facing storm subsided only near the Azores, which vividly recalled the sad story of “Maria Celeste.”
.Interesting places
The Bermuda Triangle is not only full of intangible mystery, its waters hide quite material objects. At the reefs of tropical archipelagos lie sand-covered hulks of ships that have sunk here over the past 500 years. Among them are many ancient Spanish galleons, taking gold and silver from the New World to the royal treasury.
.
Preserves of Lost Ships
.
In July 1733, 22 sailing ships loaded with silver coins left Havana. On the second day of the voyage, the fleet was caught in a violent storm. Hurricane wind drove the ships to the shoals and reefs of Florida, almost all of them crashed on the rocks and went to the bottom. The wreckage of one of them, 287-ton galleon San Pedro, lie at a depth of 6 meters off the coast of the Florida Keys, which is south of Miami. The remains of several dozen other ships from different eras have been found off the coast. These locations are listed on the U.S. Register of Historic Places.
.
Since 1989, underwater archaeological preserves have been open to scuba divers in the coastal waters of South Florida. Here it is allowed to dive, to examine the hulks of ships overgrown with coral. At the bottom you can distinguish bronze cannons, cast iron anchors.
On the beaches of Florida resorts storm waves still sometimes bring ancient gold coins and other artifacts of shipwrecks. To the lucky collectors who find such a prize, collectors offer a handsome reward.
The Bimini Road
In September 1968, a group of scuba divers dived into the waters of the Bermuda Triangle near the west coast of the uninhabited island of North Bimini, part of the Bahamian archipelago. At a depth of 5.5 meters divers found a strange formation, strikingly similar to a man-made road paved with large stone slabs, bonded with some kind of mortar. This “highway” going into the abyss, well traced for 800 meters, and then lost in the coral reefs. Closer to shore, two more slabbed sections were found, about 50 and 60 meters long. The finds were immediately dubbed the Road of Bimini. The site is now one of the world’s most popular dive sites.
.Analysis of samples of limestone slabs with shell inclusions was carried out in the laboratory of the University of Miami using modern uranium-thorium methodology. Specialists determined the age of the underwater road to be between 14,700 and 15,200 years old.
Most archaeologists and geologists dispute the dating. Scientists consider the Bimini Road a natural formation, and believe that this phenomenon appeared as a result of underground tremors that split the sedimentary bedrock into a strip of wide flat plates. But there are researchers who prove the “man-made” version. They believe that the Bimini Road is an ocean-flooded part of the structures of an unknown ancient civilization, and link it to the mythical Atlantis.
.
Sunken city off the coast of Cuba
Sargasso Sea
The Sargasso Sea is an unparalleled oceanic phenomenon in the shape of an oval about 1,000 by 3,000 kilometers, located at the eastern end of the Bermuda Triangle. Here, the Atlantic is densely dotted with brown algae of the genus Sargassum, which usually prefer marine shallows. Gas-filled bubbles attached to the stem hold the plant to the surface of the water. When Columbus’ ships entered this area of the ocean, the admiral feared that shoals and reefs were hidden beneath the algae. He ordered constant depth measurements, but the lots did not reach the bottom. It is now known that the depths in the Sargasso Sea exceed 7000 meters. One of the features of the location is the extreme transparency of turquoise-colored water. Visibility reaches 60 meters.
.This region of the Bermuda Triangle is a colossal cycle of ocean waters created by the warm Gulf Stream and other ocean currents with lower temperatures, passing here in opposite directions. Rising air currents form low-pressure zones in the atmosphere, often generating tropical hurricanes.
.
Within the Sargasso Sea, ocean turtles that come from far away hatch their young. The algae keep the babies safely hidden from predators. This region of the Atlantic is associated with a curious migration of sea eels, heading here to spawn from the rivers of Northern Europe and the East Coast of America. Having reached a certain age, young eels return to their native waters, but to reproduce invariably come here, overcoming thousands of kilometers. This strange behavior has given rise to the theory that the Sargasso Sea is above the Atlantis, which has gone to the bottom. Proponents of this theory believe that for several million years American and European eels spawned in the bays of Atlantis, and when the island was swallowed by the ocean, the memory of ancient instinct forced countless generations of eels to come to spawn in the no longer existing bays.
.
Bermuda Triangle Resorts
The tropical islands that fringe the notional waters of the Bermuda Triangle are a popular resort region bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the south, and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. It is one of the busiest destinations for international tourism, cruise ship routes and pleasure yachts.
.
A variety of entertainment centers and nature reserves are famous for the American peninsula of Florida. Magnificent beach resorts, national parks and golf courses await guests in Bermuda and the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, the archipelago of Antigua and Barbuda, the Virgin Islands. Hundreds of hotels, luxury villas and secluded beach bungalows hidden in palm oases are built on sandy coasts. Here you can find and relatively inexpensive, by local standards, cottages.”
.Coral lagoons of the tropical islands of the Bermuda Triangle beckon diving enthusiasts. Here are the best underwater landscapes on the planet, and the coastal waters are full of exotic inhabitants, from rainbow aquarium fish to barracuda, sharks and octopuses.
.
Bermuda
The Bermuda Archipelago is among the overseas possessions of the British crown. Resort vacations in Bermuda have a long tradition dating back to the 18th century. Back in Victorian times, families of wealthy planters from the colonies of British America and Canada came here to spend a few winter months on tropical islands with eternal summer. Young ladies from the colonial provinces and Royal Navy officers from the Bermuda garrison were treated to balls, horseback rides, sailing barges, picnics by the sea, and other social entertainment.
.
The capital of the archipelago is Hamilton. Founded in the 18th century, it is believed to be the oldest British city in the New World. Among the local attractions – the ancient cathedral of the Holy Trinity, built in the style of English Gothic. Fort Hamilton is also worthy of a visit. This fortress, built to protect the harbor and shipyards of the Royal Admiralty, has been preserved in pristine condition. Its formidable 6-inch artillery never fired a single shot – except for salutes in honor of royalty visiting Bermuda. The fort is now home to the Bermuda Maritime Museum and the dock houses a dolphinarium.
.
Sea trips on transparent-bottomed boats are popular. At sunset, the boat leaves the harbor and heads out into the open ocean. An hour and a half ride is accompanied by the captain’s story of incredible events that took place in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle. After admiring the setting sun, tourists settle around transparent panels on the bottom of the boat, underwater spotlights illuminate the abyss. Well visible coral reefs, silhouettes of predatory fish coming out for night hunting. The boat sails over the wrecks of sunken ships, about the wreck of each of them there is a special dramatic story. Cocktails from the ship’s bar contribute to the sharpness of impressions. The cost of the adventure – from 72 $.
.On the reefs of Bermuda wrecked more than a hundred ships. Their remains, sunk at shallow depths, attract divers. The largest ship lost here was the 152-meter Spanish steamship Cristobal Colon, which hit the coastal rocks in October 1936. Its huge hull split in two, allowing divers access to inspect the engines, steam turbines, propellers and other machinery.
.
There are many beautiful beaches in Bermuda, famous for the impeccable purity of the pink coral sand. The most popular of these is Horseshoe Bay, which is one of the top ten beaches in the world – according to Bermudians. The vast, horseshoe-shaped sandy coastline wraps around the azure surface of the bay. A high cliff separates the bay from the neighboring lagoon, where the shallow children’s beach Baby Beach is located. There are cocktail bars and cafes on the shore, where you can rent beach equipment. The cost of renting an umbrella and a sun lounger is $11. Beach towels for rent are not issued, but they are offered to buy them for 15-30 $. At the entrance there are free toilets and showers. A delicious lunch is available at the Fairmont Southampton Hotel’s restaurant, located a stone’s throw away.
.
The longest beach in Bermuda, Warwick Long Bay is popular, stretching for 3 kilometers. It is usually visited by hundreds of cruise ship passengers who stop at Hamilton Harbor. On days like this, the place is noisy. For a quiet spot by the water, head to Gibbs Hill Lighthouse for scenic views of the ocean and neighboring islands.
.
There is a bus from Hamilton Harbor to the beaches, fare is $4.5. A cab ride will cost $22-$33. However, you can ride a bicycle or walk to the ocean coast. Roads here are excellent, many islands are connected by bridges. From any point of the miniature Bermuda archipelago to the nearest equipped beach is no more than 2 km.
.
Rating of the best hotels in Bermuda in 2023 is headed by a luxury resort complex St. Regis Bermuda Resort 5 *. Rooms cost from $652 to $1127 per night. Also in the top three are the Loren at Pink Beach 5* Resort ($612 to $1321) and the Rosewood Bermuda 5* Club Golf Hotel ($752 to $1726).
.
Most tourists choose hotels in the medium price category. These include Pompano Beach Club 4* ($365-694), Grotto Bay Beach Resort & Spa 4* ($338-647), Fourways Inn 3* ($317-358).
.Travelers with a limited budget stay in guest houses, for example, in Blue Horizons Guest House (169-186 $ per night). Rooms have kitchenettes, stores and cafes are nearby, and the nearest beach is a 3-minute walk away.
.
Puerto Rico
The city of San Juan, the capital of the island of Puerto Rico, has a curious history. In 1493, Christopher Columbus’ caravel approached the island. The discoverer
