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Answers for 16 September 2026

Atlas Daily #15, Wednesday 16 September 2026: five places, each with clues from hardest to easiest. Try to name each place before you open the answers.

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The clues

Round 1

  1. A waterway where ships are lifted 26 metres by locks fed from an artificial lake.
  2. A French company began digging it in 1881 and gave up after malaria and yellow fever killed thousands.
  3. The United States finished it in 1914 and handed it over on the last day of 1999.
  4. About 14,000 ships a year cross between the Atlantic and the Pacific here.
Hint: which continent?

North America

Round 2

  1. A desert town that grew rich trading salt for gold and held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.
  2. Its university and mosques made it a centre of Islamic learning in the 15th and 16th centuries.
  3. A Scottish explorer reached it in 1826 and was killed on the way out.
  4. Its name became a byword in English for somewhere impossibly remote.
Hint: which continent?

Africa

Round 3

  1. A Latin-speaking island in a sea of Slavic and Hungarian neighbours, ringed by the Carpathians.
  2. Its 15th-century prince Vlad III inspired a Victorian novel's vampire.
  3. Its 1989 revolution ended with the execution of its dictator on Christmas Day.
  4. The Danube delta, Europe's largest wetland, spreads across its eastern coast.
Hint: which continent?

Europe

Round 4

  1. Its highlands hide more languages than any other country, over 800 in all.
  2. It shares its main island with Indonesia along a mostly straight border.
  3. Australia administered it until independence in 1975.
  4. A jungle track fought over in 1942 is a place of pilgrimage for Australians.
Hint: which continent?

Oceania

Round 5

  1. A Caucasus nation that claims the oldest wine-making tradition, with 8,000-year-old residues in clay jars.
  2. Its alphabet is used for no other language and was listed as UNESCO intangible heritage in 2016.
  3. It fought a five-day war with its northern neighbour in 2008.
  4. It shares its name with a state in the United States.
Hint: which continent?

Asia

Answers

Round 1 answer

Panama Canal, Panama · North America

Clue 5: The location is Panama Canal, Panama.

Gatún Lake, created by damming the Chagres River, supplies the water that fills the locks. Ferdinand de Lesseps's company collapsed in 1889 after some 20,000 deaths. The 2016 expansion added a third lane for larger neo-Panamax ships.

Round 2 answer

Timbuktu, Mali · Africa

Clue 5: The location is Timbuktu, Mali.

Camel caravans carried Saharan salt south and West African gold north through the town from the 12th century. The Sankoré mosque and private libraries held manuscripts on law, astronomy and medicine; many were smuggled to safety in 2012. Gordon Laing arrived in 1826 and died within weeks; René Caillié got in and out two years later.

Round 3 answer

Romania · Europe

Clue 5: The location is Romania.

Romanian descends from the Latin of the Roman province of Dacia, alone among the Balkan languages. Vlad Țepeș fought the Ottomans and became Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nicolae Ceaușescu was tried and shot on 25 December 1989.

Round 4 answer

Papua New Guinea · Oceania

Clue 5: The location is Papua New Guinea.

About 840 living languages are spoken by roughly 10 million people. The border with Indonesian Papua follows the 141st meridian for most of its length. Australian and Japanese troops fought along the Kokoda Track from July to November 1942.

Round 5 answer

Georgia · Asia

Clue 5: The location is Georgia.

Qvevri, large clay vessels buried underground, still ferment wine as they did in the Neolithic. Mkhedruli is one of only a handful of scripts invented independently rather than adapted from another. The August 2008 war left Abkhazia and South Ossetia under Russian control.

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