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Niagara Falls might be the most visited waterfalls in North America but the true ‘Waterfall Capital’ of the world lies 50 miles to the west, in the Canadian city of Hamilton. Situated in the heart of the most highly industrialized region of the country, Hamilton is also a place of great natural beauty. Its most famous natural feature are its waterfalls.

Two young women discover a city in the clouds.  Yet the more gregarious of the pair will discover that her friend is something more than she ever suspected.

If you have never had the opportunity to visit the Colorado River area of the US then sit back and soak in the sights as captured by the remarkably talented Anneliese Possberg and her team.

Paris at dawn can be a place of serene beauty.  In fact it can make people break in to dance simply by being… Paris.  Or perhaps it’s a chicken and the egg thing.  Who can say but this video created by international creative firm Magna Carta and featuring Jojo Prida dancing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower is an exhilarating few minutes of awesome dance (made to look casual and easy) with some equally breath-taking camera angles.  What would Lautrec have made of this, I wonder!

It is July 1914 and the Tour de France is underway but the country’s best cyclist encounters a few problems outside a small village.  A small incident can easily escalate as you will see in this multi-award winning animated short by Juliette Coutellier, Charlotte Da-Ros, Cyril Flous, Amélie Graffet, David Jurine and Roxane Martinez, made in Supinfocom Arles during their last year in 2015. Original music by Alexandre Chaigniau.

In 1995, scientists pointed the Hubble Telescope at an area of the sky near the Big Dipper. The location was apparently empty, and the whole endeavour was risky – what, if anything, was going to show up? But what came back was nothing short of spectacular: an image of over 1,500 galaxies glimmering in a tiny sliver of the universe. Alex Hofeldt (with animation by Bliink ) helps us understand the scale of this image.  Even after you have watched this extract from Hofeldt’s Ted-Ed lecture it is unlikely that your head will stop spinning with the enormity of the universe.

It’s perfectly reasonable to ask who Victor Noir is, just like it was a century and a half ago when the man was alive. He was an ordinary young man, an impressive fellow, who just found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody knew him until he died. His recent cult following, however, has nothing to do with the manner of his death nor its political fallout, but rather on the mysterious bulge in his pants.

I think the moral of this particular animated short could be love will find a way or, at the risk of getting all Shakespearean on you, Love's Labour's Won. 

Not far from Vancouver’s waterfront, in the historic Gastown neighborhood, stands one of the city’s major crowd-drawer—a steam-powered clock. The 16-foot-tall clock displays the time on four faces, and every quarter hour it plays the Westminster chimes on four whistles with steam shooting out of the top just like in a locomotive.

Visitors to India often describe their stay as something of a roller coaster ride so I guess it was only a matter of time before someone created a piece that gave the rest of the world the same impression. Yuribert Capetillo Hardy recently visited Kolkata and created this as a visualisation of his emotions as he experienced the real city and not the tourist traps.  This is a compelling snapshot of everyday life in one of the most vibrant cities on the planet.

Swiss wildlife photographer Franco Banfi and a team of scuba divers were following a pod of sperm whales off the coast of Dominica Island in the Caribbean Sea, when suddenly the large creatures became motionless and fell into vertical slumber. This phenomenon was first discovered only in 2008, when a team of biologists from the UK and Japan inadvertently drifted into a group of sperm whales floating just below the surface, completely oblivious to their surrounding. It was only when one of boats accidentally bumped into one of the whales, did the animal woke up and the entire pod scurried off.

In the summer of 1858, Londoners found themselves in the middle of a big stinking problem. For centuries, the city was abusing River Thames using it as dumping ground for human excrement and industrial waste resulting in a river that was little more than an open sewer devoid of any fish or other wildlife. The stench rising from the river had been a mounting problem for some years priors to the “Great Stink” of 1858. That year, the weather was unusually hot. In the scorching heat, the sewage floating in the Thames started to ferment and gave off a stench so hideous that at the Parliament, curtains were soaked in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to defeat the fetid smell. When that didn’t work, the lawmakers even considered relocating the entire government from the Westminster area to somewhere west away from the nauseous river. Eventually they decided that rebuilding London’s sewer system was the only possible solution. Within a record eighteen days, a bill was created, passed, an

Kavicsos Lake, or “pebble lake” in Hungarian, is a scenic lake about 2 km across located south of Budapest, just a 30-minute ride away from the city center. The lake sits at the site of a former pebble quarry, and hence its name.

The Strait of Gibraltar between Europe and Africa isn’t the only waterway that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. A thousand kilometer north lies another connecting route. This route connects the French city of Bordeaux, near the Atlantic ocean, to the Mediterranean port of Sète through a series of canals collectively called Canal des Deux Mers, or the “canal of the two seas.” Lying entirely in Southern France this man-made canal is one of the most remarkable feats of civil engineering carried out in the 17th century.

In 1992, a strangely curious man named Wu Anai, near the Chinese village of Shiyan Beicun in Longyou County, based on a hunch, began to pump water out of a pond in his village. Anai believed the pond was not natural, nor was it infinitely deep as the local lore went, and he decided to prove it. He convinced some of his villagers and together they bought a water pump and began to siphon water out of the pond. After 17 days of pumping, the water level fell enough to reveal the flooded entrance to an ancient, man-made cave, confirming Anai’s suspicion.

Prague is known as the city of a hundred spires but perhaps it should be renamed – momentarily – to the city of a hundred beer glasses!  This timelapse, created and edited by Kirill Neiezhmakov (whose work has appeared on Kuriositas countless times) shows the city at its very best and is up to Neiezhmakov’s usual superlative standard.  Just how he kept his hand steady after all that  beer is, however, anyone’s guess!

On maps it is called the Roncal Valley – located in the Pyrenees of north Navarre near the border of France.  Yet the local Basque people call it Erronkari which is altogether a more beautiful name. And beautiful it certainly is.. Photgrapher Iñaki Tejerina created this homage to this mystical and superlatively gorgeous place, calling it without a hint of hyperbole a Pyrenean paradise.

For reasons unknown we don’t seem to feature Australia a great deal on Kuriositas so it was great to come across this timelapse of Sydney, one of Australia’s greatest cities, by Sebastien Serville . 

Town planners today might not automatically choose a plateau 2,100 feet above sea level upon which to situate an urban development.  Times change, but over 2,000 years ago when Algeria’s third largest city, Constantine, was founded, this place, framed by a dizzying ravine, was ideal for defensive purposes.  Later, as the city prospered, it became known as the City of Bridges.

Guus and Tayfun, an award-winning creative team who make up In Return have a thing about tunnels, at the moment specifically those which connect the stations and platforms of the London Underground.  This may sound like an unremarkable subject on which to base a short film but start watching and you will find yourself swept down in to the awesome symmetry of this labyrinth beneath the city.

One of Turkey’s lesser visited but historically significant attraction is the ruin of an ancient city known as Hattusa, located near modern Boğazkale within the great loop of the Kızılırmak River. The city once served as the capital of the Hittite Empire, a superpower of the Late Bronze Age whose kingdom stretched across the face of Anatolia and northern Syria, from the Aegean in the west to the Euphrates in the east. The Hittite Empire is mentioned several times in the Bible as one of the most powerful empires of the ancient times. They were contemporary to the ancient Egyptians and every bit their equal. In the Battle of Kadesh, the Hittites fought the mighty Egyptian empire, nearly killing Pharaoh Ramses the Great, and forcing him to retreat back to Egypt. Years later, the Egyptians and the Hittites signed a peace treaty, believed to the oldest in the world, and Ramses himself married a Hittite princess to seal the deal.  The Hittites played a pivotal role in ancient his