In a town all but destroyed when its salt lake overflowed over three decades ago, the desolation is surreal: from silvery-white empty houses and hotels to trees, stark and dead; and one lonely man who calls this home.
Once a lake country spa town south of Buenos Aires, Epecuen is a lagoon with a salinity level only topped by the Dead Sea. For decades, tourists visited to take its waters believing they were good for one’s health.
Everything came crashing down in 1985 when a long period of heavy rains sent the lagoon bursting over its banks, and it swept over a busy small town.
Photo: AFP
“I had a bunch of cats and dogs, and they ran away a couple days before the flood and I never saw them again,” Norma Berg, 48, said, recalling her childhood spent here, until the flood.
“I think my pets could feel that the water was coming,” Berg said, as she glanced at the rubble of the childhood home she fled.
A town of about 40 square blocks, Epecuen was submerged beneath 10m of water.
Even when the waters eventually receded, the country town, 550km south of the capital, was never rebuilt. Its welcoming little hotels seem frozen in time, rot and rust, glistening with the salt in which they were steeped.
Berg recalls that fateful date — Nov. 10, 1985 — when the flood barely left her family and the town’s 1,500 other residents enough time to grab some belongings and run.
“A lot of the locals never, ever came back; other people just died of the shock and stress of losing everything,” Berg said sadly.
However, someone did come back. One man.
“Until about four or five years after the flood, when the waters were still high, nobody came around here at all,” said Pablo Novak, 81.
“I was totally alone. All day, every day,” said Novak, now the town’s only inhabitant.
Every day, he climbs on his bicycle and rides around surveying the eerie shells of 185 hotels, restaurants and other businesses that existed before 1985.
“I am OK here. I am just alone. I read the newspaper. And I always think of the town’s golden days,” of the 1960s and 1970s, Novak says.
Back then, as many as 20,000 people would visit every year to take the waters here.
Visitors pick up on Epecuen’s spooky vibe eying abandoned beds from a former old folks home, dozens of stranded, toppled night tables from local hotels, and upended materials visitors and businessmen tried to pry out of the rubble to reuse as construction materials.
The town’s surreal silvery cast has inspired filmmakers including Roland Joffe, who in 2009 filmed the Spanish civil war-drama There Be Dragons here; and Argentina’s Pino Solana, who filmed scenes of his El viaje (The Journey) locally.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS